Hi Steve –
So far we have worked to remove as much of the complexity of working with TELSA as possible with the resources we have had available to-date. And we hope to remove all of the interaction with TELSA in the coming months.However at present you still need to understand certain elements of TELSA in order to use it with Path.
A brief summary of the steps involved to do a spatially-explicit run of Path can be found in the Path online reference guide at http://wiki.pathmodel.com/index.php?title=TELSA_simulation. You’ll see from the steps that you still need to know how to setup and use a portion of the functionality in TELSA – basically the ArcGIS functionality that is used to prepare maps (before a simulation) and then display maps (after a simulation). The rest of the configuration of TELSA is now integrated into Path.
So… no there is not a tutorial yet for how to setup TELSA – and the instructions mentioned above do assume you understand the basics of TELSA. For new TELSA users we generally suggest a bit of one-on-one support with Leonardo Frid (lfrid@essa.com) to get up the TELSA curve. You can also try reading the introductory material in the TELSA manual (that comes with the software download at http://www.essa.com/tools/telsa/), although this material is a bit out -of-date and will not match up exactly with the latest ArcGIS software tools. The material is not difficult, but unfortunately the documentation for TELSA has not kept pace with that of Path more generally.
If you have any thoughts for how best to disseminate this kind of information to our user community, please let us know. Thanks, Colin.