Gsak & "placed" Dates

[+Old Bill]

Hello all,

 

I just install GSAK a few days ago, and have been adding in the benchmarks for the various couties near me. I have run into a problem though. Some of the marks show a "placed" date of the day I imported them into GSAK, when there is no corresponding date in the description. For example, ET0136 has a date of "UNK" in the Monument description, and another date of 1935, but it come up in GSAK as "placed" 7/2/2005. A good portion of the marks in the 5 counties I've loaded have this trouble....

 

The issue appears to be this..... Whenever the Monument date is listed as "UNK", it trips the program into setting today's date.

 

I'd really like to have the ability to sort by the date on the datasheet. Any thoughts besides manually setting them? It would be REALLY cool to have the program just skip over the "UNK" part to the next date.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thad

AKA Old Bill (Bill is the Jeep)

Edited July 2, 2005 by Old Bill

[Team Armadillo]

Go to this link and follow the instructions from LSU fan to download the files from NGS and turn them into GPX files. Then load the GPX files into GSAK. When I do that it shows the placed date as January 1 of the last Year reported.

[+Old Bill]

Thanks Team Armadillo, but that thread is what prompted me to set it all up a few days ago! I've edited my first post since I *think* I've figured out what's going on. If you can offer up any more, I'd be glad to try it!

 

Thanks,

Thad

[+gnbrotz]

I've made a suggestion in the GSAK thread that Clyde make "nothing" an option in the Global Replace feature. Even if he thinks it's a good idea, it will take some time to be implemented. In the mean time, this might be a good work-around to try:

 

Using filters and the 'global replace' option, you could isolate and change in bulk the problem dates to all match, perhaps even to a future date. This would keep them at the end of the list when you sort the whole batch by date, which is exactly what would happen if the field were completely blank.

 

**Update - Just a few minutes after my thoughts about replacing data with nothing, Clyde posted the following:

 

When you do the golobal replace just delete the date (it will still show in the box as something like "  /  /    " depending on your computer date settings, but the database will infact be updated with "blank") and you will no longer see dates in that column.

Edited July 2, 2005 by gnbrotz

[2oldfarts (the rockhounders)]

Old Bill,

 

There is a way around (at least partially) the problem.

 

You need to save the file from the NGS as a "text" file, then use the program "DSwin" (free from the NGS) and select the recovery dates (along with the other fields that you want in the database.) from the list of options. You run the resulting output file through BMGPX to get the gpx file for GSAK. You can then filter all the "newest placed" marks and sort by recovery dates. If the mark has no official recovery date, then you need to look at each one individually and hand enter the dates. I would need to go back and hunt for the old process listing to get exact details.

 

What we do now is just run the NGS file through BMGPX and load it into GSAK and then export the waypoints to our mapping program and see where they are located. We can sometimes find a "line" of the old marks and just follow it when out hunting benchmarks.

 

If you have more questions, just ask.

 

Here are a few pids to do a search on for some Old marks in your neck of the desert.

 

in Maricopa county - DU2273, DU2275, DU2269, DA0700

in Pinal county - DU2262, DU2278, DU2283, DU2284, DU2287, DU2086

 

Have fun & don't drool too much on the keyboard!

 

John

[+Old Bill]

Thanks for all the help & advise. What I've figgered out is that the trouble crops up after running the .dat file through BMGPX. BMGPX takes the "UNK" and converts it into today's date.

 

I'd use GSAK to replace this data with "nothing", but for my purposes, it isn't very helpful.

 

I'd also use DSWin to get the last found date, maybe a bit more useful, but I'm really interested in getting as close to the actual placed date as possible.

 

Ideally, the "placed" date would be the date actually place, or barring that, then the earliest date reported on the mark. But I'm not a programmer, so I'll either have to manually "fix" the .dat file before running it through BMGPX or manually edit the waypoint in GSAK. I'll probably do the latter, because I can at least do the ones near my location and not have to do them all at once.

 

Thanks again!