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Better free benchmarking software


parkrrrr

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Better, because it doesn't pound on the poor overloaded server at geocaching.com.

 

Better, because it lets you do a whole county of benchmarks in one easy download.

 

Better, because it lets you use the cool features already present in programs like GPSBabel or ClayJar's Watcher to organize your benchmark collection.

 

It's the next best thing to pocket queries for benchmarks.

 

Get BMGPX now by going to http://parkrrrr.com/ and following the link on that page. While you're there, check out some of my other free geocaching utilities.

 

warm.gif

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I have downloaded this software and it works very well. I use the gpx files created with it in both watcher on my desktop pc, and in gpx view on my pocket pc. no problems yet. no more screen scraping benchmark info for me, and i dont want to spider the already stressed site.

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Didn't realize there was already something out there. Good deal. Plus, as you mention, it doesn't drag a bunch of bandwidth from an admittedly sometimes slow geocaching site.

 

As an extra special bonus, I just deleted my program from my site and will leave a corresponding message in the other message thread.

 

Thanks!

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Great program. Good job!! Thanks for putting this out there.

 

Any chance you're planning to have it compatible with GPXSpinner?? Wouldn't take a lot of modifications (I've done it by hand with one file, but tedious to do by hand; I can write a quick program to run it through, but would be easier for me if it was just built in. haha. icon_smile.gif).

 

It would be wonderful to use this in conjuction with Watcher and GPXSpinner. I could get the file for my county, run it through Watcher to ignore the benchmarks I've already found, and then let GPXSpinner filter out based on the Watcher list to create a modified GPX file for downloading to my GPS and to create HTML files for Plucker to put on my PDA.

 

Whether you do the GPXSpinner thing or not, it's a very nice program. Great job!

 

Cheval

 

To finish is to win. www.aerc.org

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Well, I didn't have very good luck running the gpx file through Spinner (I think it objected to a non-geocache standard format), but I may have missed a setting in the .ini file.

 

However, GPX2HTML seemed to cruise through smoothly. I sent the data to my PDA with Plucker; the formatting is not quite as good as plucking the Groundspeak BM page, but all the information seems to be there. The Holy Grail is closer to us today! Fill in your accolade, Fuzzy, the benchmarking community is in your debt. We all appreciate the efforts of you, Xorand, and all the programmers who have made the information management load so much more manageable.

 

BM pocket queries will be the ultimate, but the penultimate is here and now. Woo-hoo!

 

Max

Often wrong but seldom in doubt

 

[This message was edited by embra on May 07, 2003 at 07:55 PM.]

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quote:
Originally posted by embra:

Well, I didn't have very good luck running the gpx file through Spinner (I think it objected to a non-geocache standard format), but I may have missed a setting in the .ini file.


 

Right now, it's not an ini file issue. In order to have Spinner accept the BMGPX file, I had to change some of the values of the xml tags with my favorite text editor.

 

Cheval

 

To finish is to win. www.aerc.org

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quote:
Originally posted by Cheval:

Right now, it's not an ini file issue. In order to have Spinner accept the BMGPX file, I had to change some of the values of the xml tags with my favorite text editor.


I emailed Cheval to ask which tags and what to change them to; when I get that information, provided it doesn't require me to lie about the source of the data, I'll modify BMGPX to output something that works.

 

(Edit: I just checked my email and got the answers, and they're not pretty. I think all of the changes will have to be made to Spinner rather than to BMGPX, because they all appear to be issues of GPX Spinner not accepting things that the schema says are legal. Cheval has already contacted LilDevil, but I'll put my two cents in too.)

 

In the meantime, I've spent a few minutes adding some additional formatting to the output so it looks a little better in Watcher or Plucker or whatever. It's still not perfect, but it's getting there. Those changes will be available shortly. (Another update: available now.)

 

warm.gif

 

[This message was edited by Warm Fuzzies - Fuzzy on May 08, 2003 at 11:28 AM.]

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I re-plucked the new output, and it looks a lot purtier. A nice feature with this setup is that it is easier to use the "nearest caches" feature at the bottom of the data sheet to get to the next data sheet in my BM route.

 

Thanks, Fuzzy. Not only does this make benchmark hunting easier (and therefore more fun), but it's fun to watch the improvements emerge, too.

 

Max

Often wrong but seldom in doubt

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Google tells me that GPXView can be found at http://strandberg.org/gpxview/ . I assume that's the right place; I don't use PocketPC myself.

 

Speaking of GPXView, I've heard that the <pre>-formatted tables were causing lots of unnecessary side-scrolling. Not having GPXView myself, I can't test it, but I changed the tables to be real HTML tables, along with a few other formatting improvements. I also overcame my initial laziness and fixed it so the state is correctly named in the cache properties.

 

Get it at the same place as before.

 

warm.gif

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There was a problem with all previous versions of bmgpx that has been fixed in the current version (1.04; you can see what version you have by typing "bmgpx -h" at a command prompt.)

 

In short, the bug caused bmgpx to generate incorrect "cache ID" numbers for markers whose PIDs have a numeric portion of 1000 or greater. If you've created a "found" list or an "ignore" list in Watcher, you'll find that some markers were ignored erroneously and some will now no longer be ignored. However, if you find yourself in a situation like mine where MD0974 and MD1974 are both in my county and were being assigned the same cache ID, you'll be glad you have the fixed version.

 

This might also be responsible for the problem Black Dog Trackers reported.

 

Also new in this version, the "date hidden" is set to the monumented date if my (admittedly somewhat simplistic) algorithm is able to determine one. Where just the year is given, the date is set to January 1 of that year. This allows you to sort the list of markers by their approximate age.

 

warm.gif

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quote:
Originally posted by Warm Fuzzies - Fuzzy:

There was a problem with all previous versions of bmgpx that has been fixed in the current version (1.04; you can see what version you have by typing "bmgpx -h" at a command prompt.)


 

Is anyone else having trouble with this? I had version 1.01 and it worked just fine. This morning I downloaded the new version, and every time I run it I get an "illegal operation" error message. Help! icon_confused.gif

 

Zhanna

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quote:
Originally posted by Black Dog Trackers:

Zhanna -

 

I had the same thing happen last night. I had 1.03 which worked, and 1.04 only gives an error message, unless I just use -h with no file.


 

OK. Well, I guess I'm glad to know it's not just me. bmgpx -h works fine for me too, but I get the error no matter what else I try. Hopefully there's a simple fix! I find this program very useful.

 

Zhanna

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BMGPX is really good, although I still don't see the monumented date in the date hidden. Here are my suggestions for BMGPX improvements:

 

The only columns that work well are:

Waypoint

Distance

Lat,Long

 

Geocache Name: I think the Designation should go here without the PID in front of it so it can be sorted on.

 

Placed By: Placed by on the “MONUMENTED” line of the history. Probably should also include the PLACED BY on the “FIRST OBSERVED” history line.

 

Owner: Mark Logo (usually but not always present).

 

State/Country: Should show State and county since this is easily pulled from the “STATE/COUNTY” line. US possessions have a “COUNTRY” line instead of a “STATE/COUNTY” line.

 

Date Hidden: I am always showing current date. I just downloaded the newest version and verified that it is 1.04. It should be the date on the “MONUMENTED” or “FIRST OBSERVED” history line. This will always be the first line after the HISTORY header line. Note that sometimes the date is “UNK”. It is my opinion that this should be displayed that way, if possible. Another option is to pick up the first valid date. In this case in my program, I put a “*” after the date to show the original date was UNK. However, in many cases, UNK will be the only history line. Also, is it valid to allow just the year to go thru, if that is all that is available, rather than adding the confusing “Jan. 1” to it?

 

Last Found: Last History date with Condition “MONUMENTED”, “FIRST OBSERVED”, “GOOD”, “POOR” and “SEE DESCRIPTION”.

 

Late NotFound: Last History date with Condition “MARK NOT FOUND” or “DESTROYED”. Note, the 7 conditions I listed in Last Found and Last NotFound are the only ones I have ever seen.

 

Logs: As done with caches.

 

Well, this is some food for thought. Open to discussion if anyone wants to.

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quote:
Originally posted by RogBarn:

Geocache Name: I think the Designation should go here without the PID in front of it so it can be sorted on.


That can be done, but I was sort of holding off on it until ClayJar can do something about the ugly GCFFCFE932 thing in Watcher. As it stands right now, the PID isn't visible anywhere but there.

quote:
Placed By: Placed by on the “MONUMENTED” line of the history. Probably should also include the PLACED BY on the “FIRST OBSERVED” history line.

I note that a lot of mine don't have anything on that line, but I can easily make that change.

quote:

Owner: Mark Logo (usually but not always present).


This should also be easy enough to add.

quote:

State/Country: Should show State and county since this is easily pulled from the “STATE/COUNTY” line. US possessions have a “COUNTRY” line instead of a “STATE/COUNTY” line.


I haven't actually looked at any files from outside the US, so bmgpx doesn't deal with them very well at all yet (it fills in "USA" for country on all markers.) I can't arbitrarily change the meaning of "country" to "county" though; that would raise the hackles of a lot of database types.

quote:

Date Hidden: I am always showing current date. I just downloaded the newest version and verified that it is 1.04. It should be the date on the “MONUMENTED” or “FIRST OBSERVED” history line. This will always be the first line after the HISTORY header line. Note that sometimes the date is “UNK”. It is my opinion that this should be displayed that way, if possible. Another option is to pick up the first valid date. In this case in my program, I put a “*” after the date to show the original date was UNK. However, in many cases, UNK will be the only history line. Also, is it valid to allow just the year to go thru, if that is all that is available, rather than adding the confusing “Jan. 1” to it?


The fact that they were still today's date was a bug I added late last night. That and the crash will teach me to make changes after midnight without testing them. It's still not fixed, but watch for version 1.05 soon.

 

Unfortunately, I'm constrained by what is legal for an XML date, and they're somewhat limited in terms of support for partial or unknown dates. The best I can do is to put the details in the description, as I do now.

quote:

Last Found: Last History date with Condition “MONUMENTED”, “FIRST OBSERVED”, “GOOD”, “POOR” and “SEE DESCRIPTION”.

 

Late NotFound: Last History date with Condition “MARK NOT FOUND” or “DESTROYED”. Note, the 7 conditions I listed in Last Found and Last NotFound are the only ones I have ever seen.

 

Logs: As done with caches.


I'm pretty sure ClayJar gets the "last found" and "last not found" dates from the logs, so this really boils down to how to represent the logs. Unfortunately, while the schema doesn't specify the individual types of log entries, Watcher and presumably other applications do look for specific values there, so for compatibility we'd have to create a mapping from the NGS designations to the geocaching.com designations (found, not found, note, archived, etc.) Putting the recovery text into logs is a worthy project, but a relatively involved one. I'll put on the "to do" list.

 

warm.gif

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quote:
Originally posted by Warm Fuzzies - Fuzzy:

quote:
Originally posted by RogBarn:

Geocache Name: I think the Designation should go here without the PID in front of it so it can be sorted on.


That can be done, but I was sort of holding off on it until ClayJar can do something about the ugly GCFFCFE932 thing in Watcher. As it stands right now, the PID isn't visible anywhere but there.


 

I am not surprised by most of what you say and we'll have to live with it. Or at least until someone comes up with a Benchmark specific Watcher type program icon_smile.gif

 

One thing that is different is that the PID does appear as the Waypoint. Not some strange looking GC thingy. I am using ver 1.31 of Watcher, if that makes a difference.

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quote:
Originally posted by RogBarn:

I am not surprised by most of what you say and we'll have to live with it. Or at least until someone comes up with a Benchmark specific Watcher type program icon_smile.gif

 

One thing that is different is that the PID does appear as the Waypoint. Not some strange looking GC thingy. I am using ver 1.31 of Watcher, if that makes a difference.


What do you know, you're right. That column isn't shown by default, so I'd missed its presence. Well, then, you've got your wish. This one's version 1.051, because 1.05 was up for all of five minutes before I read your comment here and went back to take the PID off the name.

 

Other new features in 1.051:

The date hidden stuff finally works, using MONUMENTED and FIRST OBSERVED as suggested.

Placed by comes from the MONUMENTED or FIRST OBSERVED line as suggested, and is blank if that line is not found or contains no agency name.

Owner comes from the MARK LOGO line as suggested.

There was a problem with the Marker Information table when lines were continued; it's fixed now.

The name field no longer contains the PID (yeah, I mentioned this above, but for those who are just skimming...)

 

warm.gif

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This is awesome! THanks for the changes!!

 

The only oddity is that UNK hidden dates end up with the current date. One possibility is to use the next history line if the first one is UNK.

 

Now, if I can just convince whoever the database people are (and I'm one, so I know where they're coming from), that STATE is just another name for STATE/COUNTY.

 

But, as I said, thanks for the work. This is definitely moving in the right direction. icon_biggrin.gif

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I was trying counties nearby, including Fairfax County, Virginia (VA059.dat). With that county, I used bmgpx and it created a .gpx file.

 

EasyGPS will load that .gpx file with no problem. Watcher will not load it, and comes up with an error message; "A name was started with an invalid character". This same thing happened with another nearby county, and then Watcher did work with a third county I tried (I forget which those two were now).

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quote:
Originally posted by Black Dog Trackers:

EasyGPS will load that .gpx file with no problem. Watcher will not load it, and comes up with an error message; "A name was started with an invalid character".


Thanks for reminding me of that one. I saw that yesterday with St. Joseph County, Indiana, but I had forgotten to investigate. It turns out that a description like "FOLLOW THE B&O RAILROAD TRACKS FOR 5.2 MILES" contains - surprise! - an ampersand character. XML doesn't like ampersands or less-than signs, and they weren't getting converted to the proper & and < entities. Now they are. I suspect EasyGPS handled it okay because EasyGPS isn't actually an XML parser. GPSBabel puked on them too, with more helpful error messages.

 

Also, there was another bug with the history tables that probably had effects on some other areas of the code as well; you might have seen an entry duplicated in the row below it in a table. That has also been fixed.

 

Version 1.052, available now.

 

warm.gif

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Fuzzy -

 

Fairfax County loads into Watcher now with no problems! Thanks!

 

I don't recall if Rogbarn mentioned these, but I have a couple more suggestions:

 

1. Encode the last report date into "Last Found". I like knowing what to expect here. Ones that haven't been found since 1956 and are in a new suburban area are most likely history, etc.

 

2. The ADJUSTED vs. SCALED value for the Lat.-Lon. coordinates is very important. I guess I'd suggest "Cache Size" for a place to put it. Terrain or Cache type are more to the point, but have small columns.

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quote:
Originally posted by Black Dog Trackers:

I don't recall if Rogbarn mentioned these, but I have a couple more suggestions:

 

1. Encode the last report date into "Last Found". I like knowing what to expect here. Ones that haven't been found since 1956 and are in a new suburban area are most likely history, etc.

 

2. The ADJUSTED vs. SCALED value for the Lat.-Lon. coordinates is very important. I guess I'd suggest "Cache Size" for a place to put it. Terrain or Cache type are more to the point, but have small columns.


 

1. I did suggest this and here is Fuzzy's response:

quote:
Originally posted by Warm Fuzzies - Fuzzy:

I'm pretty sure ClayJar gets the "last found" and "last not found" dates from the logs, so this really boils down to how to represent the logs. Unfortunately, while the schema doesn't specify the individual types of log entries, Watcher and presumably other applications do look for specific values there, so for compatibility we'd have to create a mapping from the NGS designations to the geocaching.com designations (found, not found, note, archived, etc.) Putting the recovery text into logs is a worthy project, but a relatively involved one. I'll put on the "to do" list.


 

2. This is a good suggestion. Since I use the description more than the coordinates, I didn't think of it. Terrain almost makes sense, it tells you how difficult the search will be. Cache size would be OK. I'd like to reserve cache type for marker type, the problem is that there are a whole lot more marker types than there are cache types. A quick check of what I have shows 56 different types. That could be cut down by consolidating (for example) all building types into one but it will still leave a bunch of types compared to cache types. Anyway, finding a place for adjusted vs. scaled would be good.

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quote:
Originally posted by Black Dog Trackers:

1. Encode the last report date into "Last Found". I like knowing what to expect here. Ones that haven't been found since 1956 and are in a new suburban area are most likely history, etc.


Even after this is done (see RogBarn's response) understand that not all markers will get correct info for this. For example, this mark was reported lost in 1935, but that information doesn't appear in a separate record or in the history section.

quote:
2. The ADJUSTED vs. SCALED value for the Lat.-Lon. coordinates is very important. I guess I'd suggest "Cache Size" for a place to put it. Terrain or Cache type are more to the point, but have small columns.

Well, the problem again is that the strings that go in those locations are fixed, for all intents and purposes, so if I change the container type to, say, "Adjusted", Watcher shows it as "Not Listed." However, I could bump the difficulty or terrain to 2 for scaled coordinates if you think that would help. Has anyone seen any other sources besides ADJUSTED and SCALED? One I have here has GPS OBS, but that's on the elevation.

 

Ideally, of course, we'd have our own schema for benchmarks that's separate from that for caches. I'd throw one together and propose it to the admins, but I've never found a benchmark or read a datasheet from outside my home state (really never, as opposed to all the things I've "never" done in my sig) so I know I'm not qualified to write up such a thing.

 

warm.gif

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quote:
Originally posted by Warm Fuzzies - Fuzzy:

However, I could bump the difficulty or terrain to 2 for scaled coordinates if you think that would help. Has anyone seen any other sources besides ADJUSTED and SCALED? One I have here has GPS OBS, but that's on the elevation.


I just checked what I have (over 20,000 original benchmark datasheets). I checked all lines starting with "* NAD ". All I find is adjusted and scaled. Also, all lines are "* NAD 83". The date following "NAD 83" is 1986, 1990 thru 1998, or CORS.

 

quote:
Originally posted by Warm Fuzzies - Fuzzy:

Ideally, of course, we'd have our own schema for benchmarks that's separate from that for caches. I'd throw one together and propose it to the admins, but I've never found a benchmark or read a datasheet from outside my home state (really never, as opposed to all the things I've "never" done in my sig) so I know I'm not qualified to write up such a thing.


Yes, but you can help and so can I and we should probably get started on it. I'll try to do some research and start a new thread in a day or two.

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quote:
Originally posted by hevb:

OK, I'm a mron! I have downloaded the BMGPX files. I am running XP, will this work? Where is the path I need to put this fiel? I do not have an autoexec. bat or at least I do not think so.


The easiest way to do it is just to put the bmgpx.exe in the same directory with your .dat files.

 

Someone just posted a batch file to the GPSBabel-MISC mailing list that makes the whole process more GUI-friendly, but unfortunately it hasn't shown up in the mailing list archives yet, and I don't have a copy handy. I'll try to remember to post a followup to this later when I have it available.

 

warm.gif

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quote:
Originally posted by Black Dog Trackers:

quote:
Ideally, of course, we'd have our own schema for benchmarks that's separate from that for caches. I'd throw one together and propose it to the admins,

 

Would it be easier to change Watcher to have 2 modes for the user to select via a radio button or something - geocaching vs. benchmarking?


 

Maybe, but I feel dirty enough already with the things I've done to bend the existing schema, and I'm sure ClayJar would feel even dirtier. In any case, Jeremy was hanging out in ClayJar's geocaching chat the day I was writing BMGPX, and he suggested the idea of a benchmark-specific schema, so it probably wouldn't be a particularly difficult thing to sell to The Powers That Be.

 

warm.gif

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quote:
Originally posted by Warm Fuzzies - Fuzzy:

I'll try to remember to post a followup to this later when I have it available.


 

And here it is:

 

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=2246943&forum_id=12066

 

Do what it says there, but replace the line that says

 

gpsbabel.exe -i gpx -f %1 -o s_and_t -F %1.csv

 

with one that says

 

bmgpx %1 %1.gpx

 

and you'll have an icon you can drop .dat files on to make .gpx files.

 

warm.gif

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That batch file shortcut works nicely...highly recommended.

 

I'm going to set that up for all these little applets (I think I'm going to have to sketch out a workflow diagram to keep this stuff straight!)

 

Max

Often wrong but seldom in doubt

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Wonderful software. I love the way it looks in Watcher when I click to view the page. But I'm still having trouble after that.

 

I haven't been able to load a second county into Watcher. I want to be able to use Watcher to select the benchmarks that I load into my PDA and GPS, but for now I'm limited to one county at a time. It'd be much easier for me to have a file with my closest 500 or those closest to other areas--then I don't have to change the file as often. We like to grab benchmarks (just getting started) while caching, and we usually end up in a different county while caching. Having to swap out coords in the GPS when we change counties is a bit of a pain (but easy with GPilotS.)

 

I've also had trouble running the file through Spinner. I'm about to try this again to see if I can find what needs changing. Wish me luck. If this works, I'll be VERY happy!

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Ok. It looks like I'm making some progress. I live in Kanawha County, West Virginia. For some reason Spinner chokes on the file for Kanawha County, but I just gave it another WV county and it seemed to work fine. I'll experiment a bit to see how it holds up. Does anybody know why it had trouble with Kanawha County?

 

Thanks!

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I guess part of the answer to my trouble is up above. Some reason I read the other posts after that and thought whatever was mentioned was fixed, but now after re-reading it looks like I'll either need to wait for the next version of Spinner or figure out what changes I need to make to the xml tags...

 

Oh, well. It did work for the county we cached in yesterday--too bad I didn't have this file made yesterday.

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I think Fuzzy's GPX2HTML does most of what Spinner does...have you identified a desired feature in one but not the other?

 

As for combining counties, I think you could do this with ExpertGPS...and perhaps EasyGPS (I don't know the differences between them, a waypoint limit could be there). I suppose even a text editor would do the trick, if you understand the data structure enough to make a seamless join.

 

Max

Often wrong but seldom in doubt

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Man in the Wild -

 

You can combine counties in the .dat file form. Just use DOS (an unusual form of using the copy command, but it works):

 

copy va059.dat + va061.dat vabig.dat

 

I did this, translated vabig.dat into vabig.gpx with bmgpx, and loaded the vabig.gpx into watcher.

It was kinda big - 1732 PIDs.

 

The .dat files are merely hundreds of individual PID files concatenated together.

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Thanks embra and Black Dog Trackers. Time for me to play with these options...

 

I can load and combine the files in expertgps. If I do that, will they still contain the full descriptions, etc when I save the file? If that works, that'll work just as well as using Watcher for filtering the benchmarks I want (except possibly filtering out found benchmarks somehow.)

 

On the combining dat files through dos (or whatever method--I like that one for speed,) I'll probably still have the same problem with the conversion to html through Spinner, but hopefully GPX2HTML will get around that trouble--I'll give that a try as well.

 

Sounds like there are a lot more benchmarks in those VA counties! Kanawha County--prolly the most populated in WV and including the capitol, etc has about 250 (I think.)

 

Thanks again for the help! Now to try it all out.

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quote:
Originally posted by embra:

I think Fuzzy's GPX2HTML does most of what Spinner does...have you identified a desired feature in one but not the other?


 

Features in Spinner but not in GPX2HTML:

 

Ability to specify different locations.

Spinner does it by bearing and by distance...quite handy.

 

Ability to read Watcher's ignore list.

So I can open Watcher, ignore any caches I don't care to hunt (or benchmarks I've already found) and Spinner will ignore those, too, in the spinner.gpx that I download to my GPS and in the generated html files.

 

Ability to sort caches via different criteria such as who placed them and what type of cache they are.

 

Hints are on a different page from the cache and from all other hints, keeping you from accidentally seeing hints you didn't want to.

 

Can specify a limit in miles and quantity of the caches nearest a given cache. Spinner will list all caches within the distance you specify or the maximum number of caches you specify (whichever is greater).

 

Can specify Waypoint Icons depending on the type of cache.

 

Can specify the format of a waypoint name and the description.

 

To finish is to win. www.aerc.org

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Whew...that's a lot; although I use both GPX2HTML and Spinner, I haven't used most of what you listed. However, most of those are specific to caches rather than benchmarks. Looks like the first two would be the important ones for benchmarks, yes? And maybe the limit in miles?

 

Since Spinner doesn't yet seem to process the BM gpx files, I'm trying to think of workarounds. I can presume that you would like to keep your process uniform and simplified, but GPX2HTML will give you the html files that Plucker can put into your PDA. I edit the waypoint files to eliminate the waypoints I have already found or want to ignore for some other reason.

 

I then print a one page map of the benchmarks I want to hunt for an outing, and/or use my GPSr's waypoints as the cue for searching for the data sheet. I have more data sheets in the PDA than I need, but since they supplement the GPSr's waypoints, it's not an issue.

 

In another thread, Black Dog Trackers mentioned DSWIN as a program capable of working with .dat files and able to use a point/radius select. That might be a means to select the benchmarks in a given location.

 

One can hope that Lil Devil will make Spinner benchmark-friendly, but I haven't heard if he has intentions to do so.

 

Max

Often wrong but seldom in doubt

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There's (yet another) new version of BMGPX (1.053) at the usual place. The only improvement in this version is a single bugfix that fixes some counties that were still not being converted correctly. An example of one such county is Lincoln County, WA.

 

For the nerdier among us, the bug was that while the description strings were being checked for the presence of the & and < characters, some smaller strings such as the name of the mark, the mark logo, and the owner were not being fixed. Lincoln County seems to have a mark that was placed by C&GS, which was causing problems for proper XML parsers (in other words, EasyGPS could probably read it just fine.)

 

warm.gif

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I'm still having trouble. I'm using the new 1.053 version now, and Spinner is still choking on Kanawha County, WV (and I assume other counties like Putnam which is right next door to us.)

I just tried using the files with gpx2html, and it gets farther, but instead of returning the 240+ benchmarks that are in Kanawha County, it returned about 20. The gpx file created by BMGPX does give me 240+ waypoints.

Right now I can load any of the waypoints into my PDA or GPS (I'd like to have all the points in something like Cetus if possible, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet...) but I can't get the descriptions in HTML for Plucker.

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Is anyone else having problemw getting Watcher (version 0.1.36) to write out a filtered list of Benchmarks.

 

I downloaded King County, Washington state (2716 benchmarks) and converted the dat to gpx using bmgpx version 1.052 and 1.053. I am trying to use watcher to filter down the number, and just get the closest marks to my house. I have filtered the list down 60 marks, but when I try to "Save As" the status bar only gets up to 2% then hangs.

 

Checking the task manager, I am seeing watcher grab a bunch of CPU time right at the begining, but when it hits 2% the System Idle Process get 96% of the CPU. I have let the watcher program run for 1 hour and it nevered moved off of 2%.

 

I am having the same problem with both versions of bmgpx. I have not tried an older verion of watcher. I am running Win2000. Watcher is working fine for GeoCaches.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks

JimT

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quote:
Originally posted by Man In The Wild & family:

I'm still having trouble. I'm using the new 1.053 version now, and Spinner is still choking on Kanawha County, WV (and I assume other counties like Putnam which is right next door to us.)


I think that must be a Spinner problem. GPSBabel, Watcher, and GPXDoc don't have any problems with the WV039 file I just made.

quote:

Right now I can load any of the waypoints into my PDA or GPS (I'd like to have all the points in something like Cetus if possible, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet...) but I can't get the descriptions in HTML for Plucker.


GPSBabel can output a Cetus database. GPXDoc can convert the GPX to a PalmDoc-formatted document, which might not be quite as sexy as Plucker, but it seems to work with your file.

 

warm.gif

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