Finally!

OK, now I’m glad I took a GPS logger with me! It was touch and go, and battling with so much GPS data has not been fun especially as it is indeed sooo geeky. Sometimes I just want things to work like everyone else! Not too much to ask?… plug the thing in and get a lovely map of your trip out.

I’ve only tried one device of course (GlobalSat DG100) but I’d imagine they are all similar, the software you get is pretty much only good to save the data to your PC (in various formats), the main battle then is getting the data to show up on a map like Google Maps\Earth. In between collecting the data and getting it to display there’s a whole world of pain including connecting all your individual data files together, sorting out duplicates in the files (if you’ve been an idiot at least once and not cleared the memory after saving the data etc!) and figuring out what format to work in in the first place. It’s taken ages, about 5 different software downloads and tries at using on line tools too but I’ve finally found the missing link. The missing link I found is free software called GPS TrackMaker (downloadable here). This is what I used to gather and connect all my separate tracks and then export them to Google Earth. I didn’t complain about the file sizes (which seems to have been a problem with other programs) and you can even edit the tracks by dragging points around. It doesn’t have any maps built in though and doesn’t seem to be connected to Google Maps – maybe that’s the difference betwen this and the commercial version.

I tried out Google Maps, Google Earth and Everytrail.com to actually display the tracks and the only one I could get to work originally was EveryTrail which all seemed very nice but looking at it closely it seems to really reduce the track resolution right down. I kind of thought that would have to be the way it was, maybe I just had too much data. Tried Google Maps until I went slightly deranged and got nowhere. All these programs you can download\buy use Google Maps data inside them but try uploading a track direct to Google Maps and it just looks stupid. There are other sites that take your data and write them over google maps (like GPS Visualizer, that worked really well but doesn’t allow more than 3Mb files so that was no good for a worlds worth of data). Lastly I tried Google Earth and decided against it due to it being harder to share with others. Got over that now. So in the end I used the GlobalSat software to go though the files and remove duplicates (just a really horrible manual process), then save the files as GPX files. I split the trip in two (UK-Cook Islands and NZ-UK) to avoid the problem that none of these things seem to be able to deal with going over the date line, then used GPS TrackMaker to merge the GPX files for each part into two KML (Google Earth) files. I then just opened the file in Google Earth and it worked!

Here are just a few results…. making it all worthwhile and really bringing back the memories. To see the whole trip in as much detail as you like you can check out the GPS Route Tracking section

Our Route down the Amazon River, Teotihuacan Temple of the Sun and Moon (Mexico), Chichen Itza and Angkor Wat