Yes, you can. But: There's something that I cannot recall fully, but I think it had to do with the fact that even after you extract the DEM file from tar/gz archive, you still have to add the zip extension to the resulting file (which has no extension) and then unzip it before you get the proper DEM. I did something like that for "One Morning in AD 795", but it was pretty long time ago and have never repeated it, so I don't remember whether the previous paragraph is fully correct.

-- erlik