The world’s longest mountain bike race, Tour Divide started this past Friday (June 12) and runs for the next 2+ weeks as racers pedal some 2700 miles from Canada to Mexico.

We here at TopoFusion have always been big fans of divide racing, having ridden the route in 2004, raced in 2005 and been involved in the race organization. This year we wrote and are maintaining the online SPOT tracking system:

http://tourdivide.org/leaderboard

We’ve been developing SPOT-based tracking software for the past several months. It’s been used on a number of events, including ultra mountain biking, endurance sailing, and adventure racing. This is really fun stuff, and we plan to add some special tracking features to the TopoFusion app itself.

Here’s a video of TopoFusion replaying the first six days of Tour Divide, using the Multi-track playback feature.

We’re excited to announce the release of v3.80 of TopoFusion Pro, featuring a long sought after addition to the software… elevation caching!

Thanks to Lucian Plesea over at JPL, we now have rapid access to tiled DEM (elevation) data. As you pan around in TopoFusion in v3.80, you’ll automatically be downloading DEM data, so it’ll be there if you want to go to 3D mode, or if you want to add elevation to your tracks.

Now 3D works offline, if you’ve got the data and in general it’s a whole lot faster and easier to use. That means you can add elevation to tracks and do Climbing Analysis on tracks offline, too.

Also, the ‘undo’ command has been enabled to ‘undo’ many more operations than it used it.

A summary of elevation features:

Added local caching of DEM data
– DEM data is automatically downloaded as map is panned
– Fast downloads, using OnEarth’s tiled WMS
– Stored in maps.dat structure, download once, always have
– Elevation at mouse cursor given in status bar
– Faster 3D model generation. Works offline.
– Elevation automatically added to tracks as they are drawn
– Automatically uses NED (30m) data inside US, 90 SRTM elsewhere in world
– Option for forcing SRTM available (useful for US border areas)
– Climbing Analysis uses cached data
– Increased accuracy for elevation gain and “Add Elevation to Track”
– Added box filtering to Climbing Analysis (selectable filter width)

Head over to the Download Page to try TopoFusion out, free of charge.

Registered users refer to your registration email for the download link, or go here to request your code and the download URL.

Full list of changes

For a complete list of changes see the Revision History

Team Royal Yellow, image courtesy tybee500.com

We’re continuing to improve and test our SPOT tracking software, and plan to introduce SPOT specific features in the TopoFusion app itself sometime in the near future.

The latest event to sign up to be tracked is the Tybee 500. It’s a 500+ mile endurance sailing race that runs the length of Florida and more. It’s the longest sailing race in the US. Over 6 days a total of 24 teams will test themselves. The race started this Monday (5/11/09) and runs until Saturday.

For more info on the race and frequent updates, go to www.tybee500.com Also, check twitter: http://twitter.com/tybee500

Our tracker is here: http://topofusion.com/tracker-tybee.php. Check out the daily recap videos we are posting using TopoFusion’s Multitrack playback tool.

Let us know if you have an event you’d like tracked!

The Keys 100 Reef Run will start Saturday morning April 25, 2009 from the Islander Resort in Islamorada, Florida and finish at Smathers Beach in Key West, Florida. This race replaces the Hogsbreath race of years past. Several boats are already in position at the resort, to start on this forecasted 100km (80 mile) sled ride to Key West. Live tracking on the internet will be provided by TopoFusion.com for teams equipped with SPOT Satellite Messaging Units.

Tracker available here: http://topofusion.com/tracker-sail.php

The race is for two person crewed spinnaker equipped catamarans up to 22 feet. Awards for the Keys 100 and 2008 Endurance Series will be made at the Grand Key Doubletree Resort by the pool deck at 7:00pm.

Sponsors will be the Islander Water Sports and the Tybee Island Sailing Association. The race is the weekend after the popular Miami-Key Largo and would also be a great practice race for the Tybee 500.

More information available at http://www.sailseries.com

We here at TopoFusion are looking for other races and events interested in SPOT event tracking. Contact us if you are interested — we’d love to hear from you.

We’ve always been racers here at TopoFusion. Whether on the bike or on foot, we like to support the local community. Recently we’ve cranked out a few course maps for local events. First is the Spring XC Classic, right here in Tucson. We believe in rewarding athletic excellence, so we’ve donated $350 in prize money to the overall winners (male and female) of the race. It should be a good race, with some classic desert trail and beautiful Tucson weather.

Also happening on the same day is Epic Ride’s Whiskey Off Road. Fast becoming one of the country’s premier mountain bike events, this year is sure to be a good one. As usual, TopoFusion took care of the course mapping, but regrets not being able to participate due to the Spring XC race.

For all the maps (all good examples of what TopoFusion can do) head over to:

TopoFusion’s Event Mapping page.

We’re happy to announce the release of version 3.74 of TopoFusion Pro. Atop the feature list are new and improved Canadian Topo maps. TopoFusion was one of the first mapping apps to include downloadable topographic maps for all of Canada, and now we’ve gone a step further with these new maps, available courtesy of WMS-Toporama on GeoGratis (official public announcement of this new server hasn’t even been made yet).

Example image:

click to enlarge

Here’s what the old ones looked like:

click to enlarge

Quite a difference in clarity and added info. Perhaps the best addition is that of elevation labels on the contours (which were absent on the old maps). Check them out by downloading the latest TopoFusion Pro, or for registered users, check your purchase email for download instructions.

For other additions and fixes, see Revision History.

The AZT 300 (race site) starts Friday, April 10th at 9am. It’s a self supported 300 mile race along the Arizona Trail. This year you can follow all the action using a new SPOT tracker, right here on TopoFusion.com.

The link is here:

http://topofusion.com/tracker-azt.php

SPOT units (official site) are a combo GPS unit and satellite messenger. They send out a GPS point every 10 minutes, to be collected, analyzed and presented on our web tracker, all in real time. It should provide some entertainment for those not fortunate enough to be out there on the trail with us (TopoFusion author Scott Morris will be participating in the event).

TopoFusion is proud to be a sponsor of the 2009 Cascade Cream Puff 100. The Cream Puff is one of the oldest and most challenging 100 mile mountain bike races in the country. We’ve taken care of the course mapping for this year’s event. Here’s a sample of a color aerial overview map:

TopoFusion author Scott Morris raced the CCP back in 2001, placing 9th. “It was one of the most brutal days I’ve ever had on a bike.”

For more course maps (including printable with full directions and an
awesome 3D map) head over to the TopoFusion Event Mapping page:

http://topofusion.com/race.php

Mike Curiak set off earlier this week to ride the 1,100 mile Iditarod Trail to Nome, completely unsupported. He’s carrying a SPOT GPS/satellite tracker.

We here at TopoFusion are pretty excited about his trip and have set up a tracking page to track his progress:

http://topofusion.com/spot.php

We’ve leveraged some TopoFusion technology to compute distances and speeds, all computed on-the-fly, as the SPOT points come in. You can see his track history, distance traveled, speeds and all that good stuff.

We’ll be continuing to develop the SPOT tracker as his trip proceeds. We’re also looking at adding SPOT tracking to the TopoFusion application itself. We’re hoping to see a lot of these features go into tracking self supported events as the Arizona Trail 300 and Tour Divide (the Tour Divide crew have been pioneers of SPOT tracking, and we are working with them) later in the year. If you’re interested in advanced SPOT tracking for your own event or trip drop us an email or get in touch with the Tour Divide folks. We’d love to see this technology used on other cool trips / events.

Finally, we’ll be posting text updates supplemented with TopoFusion generated maps, charts and playback videos over at Mike’s blog: http://lacemine29.blogspot.com

TopoFusion displaying geotagged photos

We’re pleased to announce the release of a new version of TopoFusion Pro. Version 3.70 features an array of improvements, new features and fixes.

New and improved PhotoFusion

TopoFusion was one of the first pieces of software to place photos using GPS tracks, and we’ve further improved all the photo display/geotagging/handling options. Most significantly, the software can now read and write coordinates into photo headers (EXIF). With PhotoFusion’s straightforward setup, this makes it one of the easiest options available for geotagging your images. TopoFusion’s display of photos and the user interface has been significantly improved as well.

For more info, see PhotoFusion.

More color aerials

We’ve added four more states to the Color Aerial Tileset. This brings us very close to covering the entire United States with high resolution imagery. Alaska, Washington, Georgia and West Virginia are new in v3.70. For more info, see Color Imagery. Remember you can also add your own servers using the WMS server feature.

Download

Head over to the Download Page to try TopoFusion out, free of charge.

Registered users refer to your registration email for the download link, or go here to request your code and the download URL.

Full list of changes

For a complete list of changes see the Revision History