Downloading coordinates

[greywolf1242]

I'm taking a trip fairly soon and want to find a number of benchmarks along the route I'm taking. Is there any way to download the coordinates for the benchmarks I want to find, other than entering each one manually into the GPSr? Am I missing something, or is there a way to 'bookmark' a number of benchmarks and then do a query? Any help would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

 

greywolf1242

[2oldfarts (the rockhounders)]

Do you use GSAK?

 

Have you download the county benchmark files from the NGS?

 

The Me First thread has info on downloading the county lists and some about links about GSAK. You can pick and choose the benchmarks that you want to load on your GPS. Some GPSr will accept the full GPX file with the descriptions for those benchmarks.

 

Let us know what other info you need.

 

John

[+LSUFan]

Greywolf, do you have a garmin nuvi by any chance?

[kayakbird]

 

way to 'bookmark' a number of benchmarks and then do a query?

Thanks

 

greywolf1242

 

greywolf1242,

 

When I am on a road trip I tend to hi-grade for (1) old (OTMe, which is way older than Okie'sKid); and (2) unique 'Placed By' such as Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), CWA State Survey (CGS+SS), Magnetic Station, GLO, one of a kind in a state, and on and on.

 

After two weeks of playing with GSAK (by state), which has a 'Placed By' column option, I have figured out how to set the filters to pull up the unique ones. However, the 'Placed' column gives the earliest year date in the history. A lot of the unique groups have UKN dates and the best way to isolate those is with the NGS ShapeFiles (by county or PID), which also has a nice to know 'LAST_COND' column and two versions of Lat/Long.

 

After a series of data sorts in a combined Excel file you can get Data Sheets for up to 200 PID's at a time from NGS, or up to 1100 waypoints at a time from the ShapeFiles. AZcachemeister has a set of CD's available with all the NGS DS's. There is a link somewhere in this forum.

 

An entire states worth of waypoints (Lat, -Long, Name) can be moved from GSAK through Excel into a laptop DeLorme map program fairly fast (after the initial state download from the NGS 'ARCHIVED ShapeFiles by STATE').

 

My infrequent method to upload my older Garmin Legend is way too archaic to be of interest here. kayakbird

[+BasicPoke]

I have a solution for you if you are using a Lowrance GPS, but you're probably not. I am making maps of the markers on a 'full state' basis from the archive shapefiles, including datasheets and eventually status from geocaching.com logs.

BasicPoke

[greywolf1242]

Do you use GSAK?

 

Have you download the county benchmark files from the NGS?

 

The Me First thread has info on downloading the county lists and some about links about GSAK. You can pick and choose the benchmarks that you want to load on your GPS. Some GPSr will accept the full GPX file with the descriptions for those benchmarks.

 

Let us know what other info you need.

 

John

I have GSAK installed, but haven't used it at all with benchmarks. Guess I'll have to work with it to see what I can come up with.

 

Thanks

[AZcachemeister]

For $10 you could have a 3-DVD set of all the marks in the 50 states...pre-converted to .gpx files for loading into GSAK to be sliced, diced and sorted any way you like.

[2oldfarts (the rockhounders)]

Do you use GSAK?

 

Have you download the county benchmark files from the NGS?

 

The Me First thread has info on downloading the county lists and some about links about GSAK. You can pick and choose the benchmarks that you want to load on your GPS. Some GPSr will accept the full GPX file with the descriptions for those benchmarks.

 

Let us know what other info you need.

 

John

I have GSAK installed, but haven't used it at all with benchmarks. Guess I'll have to work with it to see what I can come up with.

 

Thanks

 

One thing to check out with GSAK is that you can do a 'polygon' filter for either an area that you wish to search in or along a route type polygon and load only those benchmarks that are along the route you choose. Once you have done the polygon you can then export that filtered subset to your GPSr.

 

John