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Walking a Fence Line -- What app should I use to track the route?

8264637
7 months ago

Hi All,

New to garmin here. I have the Fenix 7s and have loved it for my workouts. I live on a ranch that has many acres fenced in. I'm making a map of the property and one of the things I want to sketch in are the fence lines. Google Earth generally has high enough resolution to be able to see them, but sometimes in the timber you can't quite make it out, so I'd really like to go out and walk the fence line with my garmin watch and have it track me so I can then see my route on a map, and have a good idea of where the fenceline goes (plus, what great exercise!). 

What is the best application to do this with? I'm thinking I could do a run/walk, I could use the Expedition feature, or the Track Me feature. Any insight into what would work the best would be very much appreciated. Thank you all! 

  • 0 7 months ago

    IMO (and you may have unique requirements not obvious from the post) you should just keep it simple and do a normal walk,run, hike activity just making sure you have the GPS mode on the best settings you can.  Expedition mode is designed to barely use the gps and last for days - not what you need.  Any sport activity that uses normal GPS is fine.  When done and the activity is uploaded you can use Garmin connect and (from the wheel/star icon top right) export the track as TCX, GPX, or direct to google earth (or as a fit file).  The choice here depends on what other tools you are using for the overall mapping but all of these can easily be converted to other formats using one of the many free apps available.  I don't know what options the 7s has for GPS but you are after accuracy not trying to save battery or storage space.  As you are using google earth it seems, then any of the formats listed will import in GE without issues.

  • 0 7 months ago in reply to razmichael

    In addition to the above, if you want as accurate trail as possible, switch off smart recording in the watch settings so that your location is stored every second.

  • 0 7 months ago in reply to razmichael

    Thank you! Do you happen to know if any of those apps would allow me to set a custom waypoint or marker? Say I'm walking along and I get to a gate, and I want to be able to drop a waypoint there so when I get to garmin connect I know that was waypoint 1 and that is a gate (or a water tank or any other feature).

  • 0 7 months ago in reply to 8264637

    If you want to keep it simple, you could just press the lap button at those points to create a new lap. You can see those in Garmin Connect.

  • 0 7 months ago in reply to 8264637

    Those are not actually apps but gps/tracks file formats.  Saving waypoints is easy (especially with a hot key set up). But unless things have changed waypoints are not saved within the track data so you would need to use Connect or basecamp to export the waypoints and add them separately.  There are lots of phone apps that will record both the track and any selected locations but these will get the gps data from the phone (which might well be just fine).