Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 5, Mapping with Gadgets

#58 Don’t Lose Your Tracklogs!

HACK

There are two risks associated with saving your tracklogs. The obvious risk

is running out of space. A typical GPS unit may store approximately 1,500

track points, or 25 minutes of points if you store points at the admittedly

extreme rate of one point per second. Higher-end units, like the Garmin

Legend and Vista hold 10,000 points, or almost three hours at one point a

second. It would be more common to store points less frequently, so those

1,500 points are quite useful, and 10,000 is almost an acceptable number for

those tracklog freaks. (Some recent GPS devices are offering 50,000 and

more, though 10,000 is still common.)

Sometimes a shortage of track memory leads to odd predicaments. On sev-

eral trips, I’ve brought an old laptop solely to download tracklogs because I

didn’t have a USB cable to connect my serial-only GPS to my USB-only

iBook. I also didn’t have a way to get my tracklogs off my old laptop and

onto the iBook. I didn’t have a way, that is, until I remembered that I had a

PCMCIA–to–Compact Flash adapter that worked great on the old laptop. I

copied the tracklogs to the CF card and then put the card into my digital

camera, which I connected to the iBook with a USB cable. The camera hap-

pily reported itself to the iBook as a mass storage device, allowing me to

copy off the tracklogs.

The more insidious risk of