Geocaching and Route Planning - Part 2
Previously on Geocaching and Route Planning (Part 1), we planned a geocaching trip from Austin to San Antonio, Texas. We wanted to hit all caches that was only 2 miles from I-35.
Using GPSBabel, we were able to easily accomplish this but it was tedious creating the ARC filter file. We also learned that a ARC filter file was a series of waypoints which was similiar to a route or track. So we ask the question, "Why can't we build a route in Magellan Mapsend or Garmin Mapsource and create a ARC filter file from it?" The answer is you can. Here's how.
Build the route in Mapsend or Mapsource. We'll call the route file route.rte as a example.
Now execute one of the following commands:
For Mapsource: gpsbabel -r -i mapsource -f route.rte -o arc -F AustinSARoute.arc
For Mapsend: gpsbabel -r -i mapsend -f route.rte -o arc -F AustinSARoute.arc
The -r states that we want to process the route information in the file (-f) route.rte. It is then written to a arc filter format (-o) output file (-F) called AustinSARoute.arc. The -i is the input file type.
Now we can input the ARC filter file into the command as in Part 1:
gpsbabel -i gpx -f all.gpx -x arc,file=AustinSARoute.arc,distance=2M -o gpx -F route.gpx
That's all there is to it.