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TurbinePreview — quick start. Version 1, 2026-07-26 · the web version (works on a desktop browser and on your phone)

1. What this is

TurbinePreview draws the proposed Bookham wind turbines onto your own photograph, in the right place and at the right size, using public terrain data and the turbine positions and maximum tip heights taken from the project's planning documents.

Stand somewhere that matters to you — your verandah, your gate, a road you drive every day — take a photo of the view, and the app works out which turbines would appear in that frame, how tall they would stand against the ridge, and which ones the terrain hides completely.

It works best when hills and ridgelines — the skyline — are clearly visible. Some foreground trees are OK, but not blocking everything.

Two things to be clear about from the start:

• The images are computer-generated estimates, not photographs of existing structures. They are indicative.
• The calculation knows about landform only. It does not know about trees, sheds, houses or haze, so it will sometimes show you a turbine that a stand of timber would actually block.

There is nothing to install: it is a website (Android and iPhone apps are coming soon). It runs on a desktop browser and on a phone, and it is designed so that the part you do outdoors — taking and aligning a photo — keeps working with no mobile signal at all.

Suggested order for your first go:

1. On your desktop computer, browse the captures other people have already made around Bookham and get a feel for what the tool is telling you.
2. Have a look at the same thing on your phone, and add the page to your home screen (see below).
3. Then go outside and make a capture of your own — that is the part we most want tested.

2. Setting up

The address

https://turbine-preview.au

Making an account

1. Click Log in / register at the top of the page.
2. On the sign-in screen, choose Register.
3. You'll be asked to accept the terms of use, and then to verify your email address. The verification mail comes from noreply@turbine-preview.au — check your spam or junk folder, because a brand-new sending domain often lands there the first time. Marking it "not spam" helps everything later.
4. Follow the link in the mail, and you're in.

You can browse public captures without an account at all. You need one to save your own captures to the server and to choose who can see them.

Before you head out: load Bookham while you still have signal

This is the one step that makes the field work. Do it at home, on the device you'll take outside:

1. In the Windfarm dropdown on the front page, choose Bookham.
2. Open capture & align a photo (top of the page).
3. The Bookham data package — the turbine layout plus the terrain model for the area — downloads and is kept in the browser. You'll see it listed under "Saved for offline use" with its size and the date.
4. Open the site map once too, so its tiles are cached.

Once that package is stored, the capture-and-align page works in a paddock with no bars showing. Without it, it can't compute anything.

Add it to your phone's home screen

While you're still online, put the page on your home screen:

• Android / Chrome: an Install app button appears at the top of the capture & align page — or use the browser menu ⋮ → Add to Home screen.
• iPhone / Safari: Share → Add to Home Screen.

Why bother:

• It opens full screen, without the browser chrome eating the top of your photo.
• It starts up offline — a plain browser tab may not.
• On an iPhone it protects your work. Safari deletes a website's local data after 7 days without a visit, and that includes captures you've saved but not yet uploaded. Installed home-screen apps are exempt, so installing is the fix.

3. Browsing what's already there

The front page

Three sections, top to bottom: My photos (yours), Shared photos (what other people have chosen to share, plus everything public — visible even signed out), and Windfarms (the catalog, with the proponent and project links for each site).

The Windfarm dropdown at the top scopes the whole page — set it to Bookham and stay there. Click any card to open that capture's page.

A capture's page

You get the photo with its overlay, who took it, two maps, and the numbers.

The line to learn to read is the visibility count, e.g.

4–55 turbines visible (44.91)

• 55 turbines would show something from this spot — even a blade tip.
• 4 of them would show the whole rotor circle, clear of the ridge.
• 44.91 is the total visible rotor area expressed as whole turbines — the fairest single number when most turbines are partly cut off by terrain. A single number like "55 visible" flatters; this one doesn't.

Below the photo are two maps: a close-up of the surroundings (100 m behind you, 200 m ahead, rotated so the photo's direction is "up") and the site map showing the capture point and the view area out to the skyline. Tap either to open the live map there.

The site map, and what the rings mean

On the map:

• 🔴 red dots — turbines.
• 🔵 blue markers — captures. Filled = aligned, hollow = compass-only, dashed = waiting to upload. The wedge from a marker is that photo's view area out to the skyline.
• 🟢 green dot — you, if you press My location (we only ever ask for your position when you press it).
• Red arc rings around turbines — the important one. A ring is drawn around every turbine that can be seen from the point the map is currently about, and the length of the arc is how much of the rotor is visible: a complete circle means the whole rotor clears the terrain; a short arc means only a sliver of blade does.
• Dashed circles at 1, 2, 5 and 10 km, a scale bar in the corner, and a solid black ring at the NSW guideline setback distance — inside that ring, the guideline presumes a turbine is visually dominant.

Which way is up — the compass rose

When the map is showing one particular photo — you got there by tapping a capture's map, or by opening a capture from the list — it opens turned to match that photo instead of north-up, and a small compass rose appears in the top corner. The red needle always points north; the rose's ring is gold while the map is turned and white when it is north-up.

Tap the rose to switch between the two, as often as you like.

Turned-to-match is the one to use in the field: standing where the photo was taken and facing the same way, the screen lines up with what is in front of you — a ridge on the left of the map is the ridge on your left. North-up is the better one at the desk, for comparing against other maps and planning documents.

"What would I see from my place?"

You don't have to stand somewhere to ask about it. Long-press anywhere on the map (press and hold — with a mouse too) and an amber crosshair drops there. Everything then re-answers itself for that point: the red rings recompute, and the status line under the map reads the count for that exact spot, with a link to the photo list nearest it.

Tap a turbine and you get its id and how far it is from the marked point — the crosshair if you've placed one, otherwise your position.

On farms whose package carries a wind model you also see an indicative CF — a capacity factor. A turbine rated at, say, 7 MW only produces that when the wind is strong enough; the capacity factor is the share of a full-power year it is expected to actually deliver, averaged over calm days, windy days and everything between. 35% is a good figure for NSW wind; below about 25% is a comparatively poor one. The two operating farms we check our model against measure 29% and 34%; a low figure means the proponent would earn noticeably less from the same machine, which is worth knowing when you are weighing what a project is really offering its district. It is indicative — modelled from public wind data with a stated uncertainty band, not the proponent's own (unpublished) resource assessment — and the farm's About page carries the full picture: the farm-wide figure, the energy and income bands behind it, and where the numbers come from.

Tap the crosshair to clear it and go back.

This is the feature to give a workout: drop it on your house, on the neighbour's ridge… It is honest terrain arithmetic, and it is the fastest way to find out whether a photo is worth a drive.

Sharing and exporting

Sharing — each of your captures is one of:

• Private — only you (and the site admins).
• Shared — visible to people holding the roles you tick (eg neighbours, turbine hosts).
• Public — visible to anyone, including people without an account.

Change it on the capture's page: the Change… button next to the visibility line. Private comments and impact ratings you record stay between you and the admins whatever you choose here.

Export — the Export… button builds a single image to send to anyone, tick by tick:

• the photo, with or without the overlay;
• optionally the surroundings map and the site map;
• and, always, a caption block naming the site and the counts, a QR code linking back to the capture's page, and the disclaimer.

On a phone you also get Share image, which hands it straight to Messages, email or WhatsApp. That exported image is the thing to put in a submission or send to a neighbour — it carries its own provenance.

Please don't share anything with Squadron yet! We'll let you know as soon as we're ready for that.

4. Making your own capture

Pick a spot that matters, and:

1. Set the windfarm to Bookham on the front page, then open capture & align a photo.
2. Take the photo. Two ways, and the choice matters:
   • Take photo here (the button on the page) — uses the browser's camera. It records your position automatically, which is what lets the overlay place itself without guessing. Resolution may be lower than your camera app's best.
   • Choose file — take it with your normal camera app first, then pick it here. Best quality, and it reads the location and compass heading from the photo's EXIF if your camera app was allowed to record them. (Worth checking that setting once, at home.)
   Shoot landscape, hold still, and try to get some ridge line in frame — the ridge is what the alignment locks onto.
3. Align. The page draws the computed skyline and turbines over your photo and tries to fit it automatically. Then nudge it yourself:
   • drag — direction and tilt;
   • two fingers (or mouse wheel) — rotate and zoom;
   • focal length slider — open it if the drawn skyline is too wide or too narrow for the photo; some phones don't report their lens honestly.
   • Reset starts the fit over.
   Aim to get the drawn skyline sitting on the photographed skyline. When those two agree, the turbines are in the right place.
4. Save… — then fill in About this photo: what kind of viewpoint it is, a public comment, a private comment and impact rating (admins only), and field notes to the developers — please use that box, it is read.
5. Save & upload finishes it.

If the automatic fit refuses ("only 0 clean skyline columns" or similar), that's usually low sun, glow or haze washing out the ridge. Nothing is lost: save it anyway and align it by hand, then or later. Turning your phone slightly (new photo) to put the glow further off to one side often fixes it.

If the camera preview stays black (iPhone, home-screen app)

On iPhones, the copy you added to your home screen can occasionally open Take photo here to a black preview: the phone gets into a state where it withholds the camera from installed web apps, even though Safari itself is fine. The line under the preview will say what's wrong. The remedy that has worked in the field is simply to restart the phone, open the app again and accept the camera permission when it asks. Nothing is blocked in the meantime: Choose file still works (your camera app is unaffected), and so does opening the same page in Safari.

5. Online, offline, and signing in

It is built to work in the field with no internet. With the Bookham package saved, you can open the page, take a photo, align it and save it with no signal at all.

Works offline: the capture & align page, the saved Bookham layout and terrain, the alignment, saving, and the map inside the align page.

Needs a connection: browsing photos on the server, the windfarm catalog, signing in, and uploading.

You do not need to be logged in to capture. Save first, identity later — that is deliberate. When you save:

• Offline: "Saved. You're offline — it uploads automatically when you're back online and signed in." The capture sits in this browser's queue. You'll see it as a card in the list marked waiting to upload, and as a dashed marker on the map.
• Signed out but online: the sign-in screen may appear. Your capture has already been saved before that happens — if you don't want to sign in standing in a paddock, back out of the login screen and it stays safely queued.
• Next time you open the site online and signed in, the queue drains by itself and your captures appear on the server.

Two cautions about the queue:

• Queued captures live in that browser on that device. Don't clear site data / "browsing data" before they've uploaded.
• On an iPhone, install to the home screen (§2) — otherwise Safari may bin them after 7 days of not visiting.

6. Telling us how it went

This is a beta and you are the reason it will get better. Three ways, best first:

• Field notes on the capture itself — the Field notes to the developers box, either when you save or later on the capture's page. These travel with the capture, so we can look at exactly what you were looking at. A note written at the spot is worth three reconstructed from memory.
• feedback@turbine-preview.au — anything about how it works, what confused you, what you wish it did.
• help@turbine-preview.au — when something is broken or you're stuck.

What's especially useful to include: what device and browser, a screenshot, roughly when, where you were, and what you expected to happen instead. If the overlay looked wrong — turbines in the wrong place, or the wrong size — tell us, and leave the capture on the server so we can look at it.