Mapping Hacks

Import Your GPS Waypoints and Tracklogs into GRASS #70

Chapter 6, Mapping on Your Desktop

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#70

Import Your GPS Waypoints and Tracklogs into

GRASS Hack #70

Use GRASS to tell the story of your travels on a customized map.

GRASS has a reputation as a complicated program that can do anything, but

at the cost of hair-pulling pain. Here is a (relatively) simple guide to getting

GRASS to do interesting things with your own GPS data. Along the way,

we’ll also convince GRASS to show us some interesting base-map layers as a

way of providing context for our own story. By this point, you’ve probably

loaded some waypoints and tracklogs from your GPS receiver onto your

computer: now, let’s import them into GRASS!

Before Version 5.7, GRASS referred to point data as “site” data, and there

were s. commands to manipulate site data. As of Version 5.7, points are

Figure 6-28. The borders and eco layers shown together

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Chapter 6, Mapping on Your Desktop

#70 Import Your GPS Waypoints and Tracklogs into GRASS

HACK

included in the much improved “Vector” format. A point is just the sim-

plest vector. Some of the old s. sites commands now work with point data

but store the points in the new vector format.

The s.in.ascii command imports text data into a vector file. You can specify a

comma as your input field separator ...