Bmgpx And/or Gpsbabel Failure

[+bicknell]

I decided to download a small packet (about 15) benchmarks near my office so I could do some lunchtime hunting. About 2/3 have been found, so it should be educational.

 

I got the data from the NGS, ran bmgpx on it which seems to have produced valid xml, and then ran gpsbabel on it to get .mps or .wpt files (I've used both with mapsource before). Well, the .mps and .wpt 's were empty. I then noticed the text file I downloaded from the NGS was different from the last one I got (all of Loudoun County) in that at the end it had a text block describing marks that had been destroyed. I simply removed that making it end at the same report ending line. Reran bmgpx, got again what looks like valid xml. Now when I run gpsbable on it gpsbabel it crashes and doesn't produce anything.

 

I'm thinking the authors of one or both programs may want my text file so they can see what's going wrong. Are either of them active here?

[+gnbrotz]

Can't address the technical problems you've had, but Garmin's latest beta update for Mapsource accepts .gpx files without any other conversion.

[+bicknell]

Tried new mapsource (thanks), it refuses to load the GPX files with a generic "can't load" message.

 

Looking at the text, I see several have HUGE descriptions (one is two full pages just of description), so perhaps that's the problem. I'll try removing those and reimporting. Otherwise, it's most likely a bmgpx problem, I'll have to contact the author.

[+gnbrotz]

How did you originally pull the files from NGS? I didn't know there was a way to grab 15 like you mentioned. Perhaps the origin of you waypoint data is the cause?

 

You might try and download an entire county and see if you can duplicate this problem.

[+bicknell]

I downloaded a county with no issue. For this search I did a radial from a lat/lon. The resulting text file looked like the same format to me.

[evenfall]

I believe you can ask for up to 200 PID's at a time from the datasheet page also.

 

Datasheets can be retrieved for one or more PIDs

up to a limit of 200 PIDs.

 

In the box below type in one or more PIDs

or load the PIDs from a file.

(Max PIDs allowed = 200)

 

Rob

[+gnbrotz]

I'm not sure if "retrieved" is the same as downloading them. That's beyond my knowledge. I'm not aware of anyone using BMGPX for anything other than the county file downloads.

 

Has anyone else done this successfully?

[evenfall]

Greg,

 

I think it will work fine, it is just text file data, and though you can choose 200 one way, if you go the county route you also have the option to select only the marks you want from that county.

 

These programs aren't something I use, but on this end I use the Datasheet site in all ways and my computers treat all of it as text.

 

2oldfarts had some great info on mark hunting using the geocaching site in a previous post as well. It seems that the best of all worlds is to use both.

 

Play with it, what would be the harm? We all learn the cool new stuff this way.

 

Rob

[2oldfarts (the rockhounders)]

Tried new mapsource (thanks), it refuses to load the GPX files with a generic "can't load" message.

 

Looking at the text, I see several have HUGE descriptions (one is two full pages just of description), so perhaps that's the problem. I'll try removing those and reimporting. Otherwise, it's most likely a bmgpx problem, I'll have to contact the author.

 

I don't believe that there is a problem with your programs. It is the manner in which you are manipulating the datasheets.

 

If you go to the datasheet page, and then click on the datasheets button, click on PIDs-permanent identifiers. enter the pids for the benchmarks that you want and click submit. (I used an "enter" after each PID.) Click "select all" then click "get datasheets".

 

Now before you do anything else Click the "file" button on your taskbar and select "Save as" and be sure to save it as a TEXT file. Remember where you saved it to.

 

Drag and drop this text file on the "BMGPX" icon and get your gpx file.

 

Have fun.

 

John

[+gnbrotz]

2oldfarts:

 

Thanks for explaining how to do this. It never occurred to me to try this. I did a test run and got mixed results.

 

BMPGX created a .gpx file which opened in both ExpertGPS and GSAK, but would not open in Mapsource.

 

I looked at the GSAK entries and noticed that while I collected 10 datasheets, 13 waypoints were now listed in the file. All 13 also appeared in ExpertGPS, but I used GSAK to check for descriptions and extra info that ExpertGPS doesn't handle. The extra points consisted of the following:

• One with all fields blank.
  
• One that had a duplicate waypoint name, but different "code". In that field, where the PID would typically be, was the word "Elapse", seemingly grabbed from the last line of the returned datasheet page.
  
• The third one was similar to the second, except the word "The" was substituted, seemingly grabbed from the first line of the returned page. In this case, the word "The" was also listed in the waypoint name field.
  

I deleted the extra waypoints from the GSAK database, then exported it as a new .gpx. This file opened properly in Mapsource

[2oldfarts (the rockhounders)]

I had tried to open the GPX file with EasyGPS and with Watcher. Both opened it. With Watcher I click on the top listing and it brought up the datasheet, so I failed to check the rest of the download.

 

I only had 1 errant 'file' and it was just the name/designation of the benchmark and had nothing else.

 

I also noticed that DSWIN would not let you select the fields individually, so I used the original save text file for BMGPX.

 

John

[+bicknell]

I tried this with a number of data sets, and I found the following behavior:

 

bmgpx leaves 1-3 waypoints with lat/log of 0/0 at the front of the .gpx file, I have to remove all of them in a text editor.

 

bmgpx leaves 1-2 waypoints with "bogus" names at the end of the .gpx file, I have to remove all of them with a text editor.

 

Doing both allows all tools to load the .gpx file, including directly into mapsource..

 

I think bmgpx could be a bit more robust, but since a .gpx is just text it's not like it's the end of the world.

[+FotoMoto]

I go in and edit the text file after downloading from the ngs site, but before running it through BMGPX).

 

If you remove the first few lines (down to but not including the first bench mark line - something like SYxxxx *********** ...), and then remove the stuff at the bottom (the *** retrieval complete down to the end of file), save the file, and then run it through BMGPX, the resulting .gpx file should load directly into MapSource (at least it does for me).