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Drawing With Mapsource


GOT GPS?

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The ability to draw tracks is long overdue, and a wonderful addition to Mapsource. I've played around with it quite a bit and really like it. It does have some quirks, like inserting track points only a few feet apart. I've used the "filter" function to trim down the track lengths since the 60c maximum track length is 500 track points.

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If you have trails that you have hiked 2 or more times, this feature comes in handy, and works better than software could do an average of all the tracklogs. When you draw your tracklog over the jumble of previous hikes on a trail, to create the averaged tracklog, you then would save that handmade track to a trail network folder, and this is what im going to do with alot of my trail hikes ive done.

 

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Geoff

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The ability to draw tracks is long overdue, and a wonderful addition to Mapsource. I've played around with it quite a bit and really like it. It does have some quirks, like inserting track points only a few feet apart. I've used the "filter" function to trim down the track lengths since the 60c maximum track length is 500 track points.

I could be wrong (and it happens often) but is there not some way to load a track to a GPSr as the active track? I'm sure I read of this here in the forums in the past. If that's the case then you would have a 10,000 trackpoint limit instead of the 500. I'll do some searching when I get home from work.

 

Cheers, Olar

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Hey that's great news. It becomes a terrific tool to create trackpoints along a route in order to feed into GSAK and get a list of caches along that route. I'll download it when I get home from work tonight.

 

Thanks for the tip Geoff.

 

Cheers, Olar

 

How do you do that?

I don't have GSAK here at work so I'll have to wait till later to answer exactly how to do it. Basically you have to copy and paste all the trackpoints to GSAK's filter and specify what distance from track to search for caches. Obviously you must have all the caches from the areas you will be travelling through already downloaded to GSAK.

 

Later, Olar

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Hey, I didn't notice that. (I didn't think to look for it.) That is good news. Now I can't wait to get home from work so I can test it out to see if it would be useful for merely annotating maps. (I wish they'd add a feature to able to add text.)

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You can load the "active track" into a 60c and other Garmins I've owned. The track name has to start with "Active Log". You can load multiple tracks at once named "Active Log..xxx" (each must start with "Active Log" and have a unique name) and they will be loaded into the 10,000 trackpoint active log of a 60c. Pretty cool.

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Basically you have to copy and paste all the trackpoints to GSAK's filter .....

 

No need to copy and paste. GSAK allows you to use "Load From File" to bring the coordinates into the arc/poly filter. Also, although the ability to draw tracklines is a nice feature you can use the auto routing feature in MapSource to create the points required for an arc filter.

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The ability to draw tracks is long overdue, and a wonderful addition to Mapsource. I've played around with it quite a bit and really like it. It does have some quirks, like inserting track points only a few feet apart. I've used the "filter" function to trim down the track lengths since the 60c maximum track length is 500 track points.

 

Maximun trackpoints in a 60c is 10,000............ Not 500

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My Mistake! ....and I learned something in the process.

 

I do a lot of trail mapping with my 76CS and a lot of the tracks that Ive downloaded from it into Topo are WELL more than the length required to log 500 points. .and here's what is wierd. I always clear the active track log at the beginning of the trail then I save the track at the end of whatever I'm mapping , Go to the next one and repeat the process, starting with clearing the active track log. AND I always clear the tracklog before downloading into my PC to prevent "double downloading " the last track+the active tracklog

 

Even the LONG tracks (longer than 500 t points) are saved and downloaded complete with no gaps or truncated.

 

If I hand draw a track in either Mapsource or Expert GPS and try to upload into my GPSr THAT is when I find out it won't take a track of greater than 500 points.

 

Sounds like it's a one directional limitation ???

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If I understand the issue, the 60c can store up to 10,000 in the active track log. After that, it will either stop recording or overwrite existing points (user configurable preference in Setup). When you "save" the active log it creates a stored track (1 of 20). I believe the saved/stored track is truncated to 500 points. I confirmed that with this experiment: I uploaded 33 "ACTIVE LOG" tracks to the 60c. The total combined track points was 1004. Next, I SAVED the active track. I downloaded the tracks to Mapsource. The SAVED track was exactly 500 points.

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My Mistake! ....and I learned something in the process.

 

I do a lot of trail mapping with my 76CS and a lot of the tracks that Ive downloaded from it into Topo are WELL more than the length required to log 500 points. .and here's what is wierd. I always clear the active track log at the beginning of the trail then I save the track at the end of whatever I'm mapping , Go to the next one and repeat the process, starting with clearing the active track log. AND I always clear the tracklog before downloading into my PC to prevent "double downloading " the last track+the active tracklog

 

Even the LONG tracks (longer than 500 t points) are saved and downloaded complete with no gaps or truncated.

 

If I hand draw a track in either Mapsource or Expert GPS and try to upload into my GPSr THAT is when I find out it won't take a track of greater than 500 points.

 

Sounds like it's a one directional limitation ???

 

When you save the active track on the GPSr (my experience is with the VistaC), it will automatically filter the track length down to below 500 points. (It also strips out the timestamp data). You won't see gaps or truncations, but the track will be coarser than the original active track. I personally use the "saved tracks" to have rough maps of previous trips (MTB rides) to an area, but I'll download the original active tracklog to the computer with it's full detail. Some of these get filtered and sent back to the GPSr for use on future trips.

 

Keith

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I KNEW I wasn't TOTALLY full of prunes.....

 

Here's how to get around the 500 tp limit...

 

In Mapsource, I hand drew a track of 1045 points, closely following a very crooked road.

In track properties I renamed the track Active log 1

I cleared the active tracklog in my GPSr

I uploaded that track named "Active Log 1" from Mapsource into my GPSr which stored it in the GPSr's 10,000 tp capacity.

I then saved it as a track in my GPSr using the default date naming .

 

Downloaded from my GPSr into another Mapsource file to verify........It came out perfect, 1045 points just like the original following the road the same....ie an exact duplicate.

 

In short, you just have to go thru the Active Log. If it is coming from internally, it will accept more than the 500 points. Effectively eliminating the 500 / track limit. "Wrap when full" would then be the limit I guess.

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"Downloaded from my GPSr into another Mapsource file to verify........It came out perfect, 1045 points just like the original following the road the same....ie an exact duplicate."

 

Unless you CLEARed the active track first, when you downloaded you should have had two tracks: the Active Log which should be 1045, and a second, saved track of <=500.

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Save the "Active Log" and it will be saved as "today's date"

 

Then you have two "copies", one still in active log and one saved in the tracklist.....NOT FILTERED DOWN to 500 tp....it is the same as in the active log

 

Then when you clear the ActiveLog, you get rid of the duplicate.

 

The 500 limit never comes into play since the track is coming from internally.

 

In spite of one of the posts above, MY GPSr (Map76CS) does NOT filter to <=500 before saving.

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