Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 5, Mapping with Gadgets

#52 Show Your Waypoints on Aerial Photos with Terrabrowser

HACK

Live Tracking in Terrabrowser Version 1.1.0

Under Version 1.1.0, you can connect a Garmin GPS to your computer and

have live tracking of your position over an aerial photo.

You may need to allow the program access to your serial ports:

$ sudo chmod 777 /dev/cu*

and then set your GPS to output data in NMEA format. Then in Terra-

browser, select the following menu options, as shown in Figure 5-5:

GPS->Protocol->NMEA,

GPS->Serial Port->usbserial0

GPS->Connect (figure 1)

GPS->Enable Live Tracking

An aerial photo should pop up with your current location shown. If you

happen to be visiting me in Sebastopol, California, it will look identical to

Figure 5-6; otherwise, you will see a photo of your location.

The new version provides additional information on the GPS status, but live

tracking is not yet bug-free.

Using Terrabrowser to View and Edit Waypoints

In addition to live position tracking, Terrabrowser implements a very nice

multifile GPX waypoint editor and viewer, shown in Figure 5-7. You can

open multiple GPX files, edit waypoints, and copy and paste between way-

point files with a nice tabular interface. The waypoint editor also allows you

full access to all the waypoint features, including a nice drop-down of way-

point symbols.

Another great feature is the ability to search by ZIP Code. Select Navigate ...