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> Is it a materialized remapping of the underlying .hgt or is it done client-side, in some webGL-shader?

The map loads pre-rendered map tiles as JPG images from Amazon S3 (you can confirm this in the Network tab of your browser's dev tools).

The page says:

> This map layer is hosted as a public service, and map tiles are free to use under a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

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Geosynced DEMs prepped to feed into microwave link design software can cost a lot of money. I knew one engineer who was sent up in a special plane they found just to photograph a remote region and then he matched the elevation data by hand for all the routes. I don't know what the non commercial uses are for this data but I suspect it would be otherwise prohibitively expensive without the CC4.0 license so I am happy for whomever it benefits.

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