Sunday, November 2, 2014

GPS waypoints from Spreadsheet with Gbabel

Hotpluging; I couldn't make this work however.

It doesn’t have to recognise the GPS as a USB device provided it will mount it. You can setup the GPS in the paths and gbabel will read from the files created.  The main task is to get the UTM conversions done which gbabbel does when the unicsv file format is invoked. The documentation talks about  a grid options switch following the file type in the script and suggests you set that up. The GUI has no options for file types but you can manually insert them into the script.
Write position using this grid..
This value specifies the grid to be used on write.

Table 3.1. Grid values for garmin_txt
# idxshortfile-headersample
0dddLat/Lon hddd.dddddS26.25333 E27.92333
1dmmLat/Lon hddd°mm.mmN33 56.539 W118 24.471
2dmsLat/Lon hddd°mm'ss.sS25 25 26.8 E28 06 07.3
3bngBritish National GridTQ 18919 69392
4utmUniversal Transverse Mercator33 U 318293 5637154
5swissSwiss grid776519 167359

Idx or short are valid params for this option.

Example:

gpsbabel -w -i geo -f /home/mark/Documents/GPS/geocaching(1).loc -i geo -f /home/mark/Documents/GPS/geocaching.loc -x duplicate,location -o kml -F /home/mark/Documents/GPS/Waypoints_output.kml -o unicsv,grid=4 -F /home/mark/Documents/GPS/geocache.csv



You can also setup multiple input/outputs and filters.  This means you might want to retain the GUI for post survey processing. For instance you can compare two sets of data and flag instance where a point is different between the two sets by a given distance.
The intruiguing thing is that it will work when the script is copied into a terminal (watch for illegal file names ie no spaces). 

The real thumbs up is that gbabel is cross platform and though all my experimentation is being done under Ubuntu this should run just fine under windows.