I use a Garmin 510 to record my cycling activities.
For me, .tcx exports created from the GC website
after March 8th 2015 started to exhibit a problem - they lacked both AltitudeMeters and
Speed nodes.
Altitude summary info is still being displayed for those
affected activities, both in the GC website and in Strava.
It seemed clear that my 510 was still recording altitude;
and that it was GC's backend export routines which were failing to include
the AltitudeMeters nodes in the exported xml.
So, I looked around the web for another method of converting the .fit
files which can be found in the Activities folder of the 510, into
.tcx files. I found one here:
TCX Converter - Get your altitude nodes back!
TCX Converter is a donationware program which, among other things, can
take a .fit file and convert it to a .tcx. I took a chance and downloaded
from the link above. It works as advertised, and was not bundled with
any other potentially unwanted programs.
TCX Converter could take a .fit file that Garmin Connect failed
to create a .tcx file with AltitudeMeters nodes from, and create
a .tcx file with AltitudeMeters nodes. Altitude problem solved!
However, TCX Converter did not recover Speed nodes from .fit files
created after March 8. But speed can be calculated from distance and
time. I wrote an HTML 5 based web page which calculates speed
based on the distance traveled from one trackpoint to the next
and appends a speed node to the xml. It then dumps the revised
xml to a textarea on the web page. All you have to do is copy
& paste the contents of the textarea into a text file, and
save the text file with a .tcx extension and you should be good
to go! The program works entirely in the browser, it involves
no uploading to/downloading from data from my domain.
This version of the utility only works with a single track,
and it also assumes that your device is sampling once per second.
The TCX Speed Node Calculator can be found here:
Speed Node Calculator - Get your speed nodes back!
It's definitely a hassle to go through these extra steps, but hopefully Garmin will have
the problem fixed soon!
