Mapping Trails

[Troy Hartman]

It would be a great feature if TF could just make a map of a tracked trail from my GPS without adding timing information. In short all I need to do is go into a forest, track trails, and make a map of it.

Currently it appears that TF (and all other mapping software that I've seen) take into account the timing info of the tracked trail for potential playback. I'm not interested in playback of the track. I just need to have the map.

I don't understand.

The most basic usage of TopoFusion is just as you describe.  You take your GPS into the field, record a track, download it and BOOM you have a map, right in front of you.

All the extra function dealing with time (like playback) are just that -- extra.

What kind of timing information are you talking about?

I may map a forest on my GPS over many days. When I load the tracks into the software, it tries to reconcile all the timing data and I get tracking errors such as the last point on day one was on the west side of the forest and the first point on day two was on the east side of the forest and the software draps a long line between those two points.

Yes, I know I can reverse that leg and occasionally that works fine. The problem is when there are many days of tracking involved, reversing the leg doesn't always work and the map becomes useless due to all of the extra drawn in legs.

All I'd like it to do is just map the position and not worry about playing back the track.

I hope that makes sense.

[Krein]

OK, I see what you're saying.

It's pretty easy to do this with TopoFusion's download tracks option.  Every time you turn the GPS on/off you get a seperate track.  When you download a dialog will pop up allowing you to merge different days ONLY if you want to.

You can do "save all" to save each day as seperate tracks in a single GPX file, or (preferred method) you can select each day seperately and save them to different GPX files.

I do this all the time with my data.  I don't like it how most other software will force you to "connect the dots."

Hope this helps.