Help with tracks and routes.

Former Member over 8 years ago

I have a Garmin 680t that I have used for about a year now. I have quite a bit of information and I’m trying to clean up some tracks in basecamp. My intention is to get my data cleaned up and do a fresh transfer back to my GPS.

I have several problems with my tracks, some overlap and some have segments that just go haywire when the GPS lost signal so a segment just skips a big part of the road. Lets say I’m camping in an area and I drive up and down the same road to several sideroads and up and down those sideroads sometimes recording tracks in both directions sometimes not.

So I guess my question is what is the best approach to cleaning up my tracks? I like the tracks because they include data on date and time they were recorded and I can look at the map later and remember where I’ve been. I’m afraid to mess with them, like deleting of moving points, because I don’t know if I can ever get the data back if I screw up. Dose it change the date data on the whole track if I modify it? How is the track stored in the database exactly?

I learned a lot about waypoints and how the database handles them in this thread.
https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?369198-Waypoint-Manager

Also when I use my GPS I can only view, as I recall, one track at a time, I would like to be able to view them all at the same time because that’s basically the map I’m using. How can I view all the tracks on my GPS at once? Would routes all show up at the same time? Should I just leave my tracks alone and convert them to routes and mess with points on the routes? When should I use tracks and when routes?

BTW I did read the basecamp help but it’s pretty basic.

Thanks for any help anyone can provide.

0 SUSSAMB over 8 years ago

I think if you mess with the tracks you may very well lose data, my suggestion would be to duplicate a track so that if there is an issue you still have the original.

As for seeing all tracks on your device, you can set whether they show or not in track manager

0 BTLAAKE over 8 years ago

Tracks are a series of Track Points. A recorded Track Point consists of Latitude, Longitude, Elevation and UTC Time (which includes date). So as long as the Time data remains in the Track, you will not loose track of when the data was recorded.

Tracks created in BaseCamp will not have Time data and might have Elevation data if the underlying map contains a digital elevation model.

When Time data is viewed within BaseCamp, the UTC time stamp is converted to the time zone of the computer, not to the local time wherever the event happened.

I believe newer devices will also save the Trip Computer data for a Track. This will be displayed in the Summary area. It is not based on the Track Log. To see the difference, you can duplicate one of your tracks. Divide it with the scissors tool, then rejoin the two sections. This will preserve all the points, but force a recalculation based on the Logged data. The Logged data is usually the more accurate of the two. Any change to a Track will lose the summary based on the Trip Computer.

Deleting/erasing points should not cause a problem. The summary will be recalculated. Moving a point will change its location, but not its time stamp. This may affect something like Min/Max Speed.

Inserting points may be risky as they will not have a Time Stamp. Splicing different Tracks together may be risky because Time Stamps may differ by days or you could travel backwards in time. However, you can reverse a track without it messing up the Summary. I’m just not sure about splicing different tracks.

I would suggests that you duplicate a couple of Tracks and move them to an empty list where you can try out the various tools as well as reversing errors with the Undo command. I would also open up the Track Properties window while you do this to verify the Time data remains in the track. If you like the results you can delete the originals and rename the duplicates.

I believe only Active Routes are visible on devices. I think that converting a Track to a Route will loose the Time data. Track to Route to Track for the purpose of removing Time may be useful for combining tracks recorded on different occasions. Distance data can still be calculated, but summary data requiring Time will be lost. I am not sure what will happen with the elevation data.