Track data incomplete with GPSMap 545

Former Member over 11 years ago

I have a 545 chartplotter, which can supposedly save 10,000 points per track. It is configured to record a point every 30 seconds. Everything works fine when I view a track with 500 points or so, but recently I completed a 12-hour race, which should have produced about 1440 points.

When I double-click the track in HomePort, it covers the full time span but it has only 700 points, and the important data columns for Leg time, Leg speed, and Time are missing. Where is this data getting lost? Is there any fix for this other than making sure all my tracks have less than 700 points?

The odd thing is that I have an old track from 2010 that has 7,176 points recorded over a period of about 8 hours (using different criteria for recording), and that has all the data.

0 Former Member over 11 years ago

I sent this issue to Product Support and learned the following:

In the 545 and other devices, the Active log holds up to 10,000 data points (device dependent). The Active log includes the complete data. You save up to 20 named logs on the device, but the saved logs are condensed to a device-dependent number of points and some of the point data is dropped. Because the time data is lost, you can no longer retrieve speeds along the track.

If for example you want to preserve several logs, each with all the data for one day's sailing, you should use the following procedure:

Each day
Clear active log
--sail for a day--
Transfer data to card
repeat

Each time you transfer the data to the card, the current Active log data will be saved in a sequentially numbered ACTIVE LOG nnn file. Any named logs you have saved on the device are also transferred to the card, but their data is incomplete.

Then you move the card to the PC and in HomePort, look through the ACTIVE LOG nnn tracks to find the one for a particular day. If you double-click on the track then click on Graph, you can view speed and COG vs distance. You can also export the data in a variety of formats.

Now if only the device would record the wind speed and direction, I could do some serious analysis...