In reply to M1MAJ:
You’re absolutely right that I’m asking for routes: but I would guess that nobody has such a thing. Instead, they do have GPS-recorded tracks of where they’ve been, including all the little excursions to take a photo, tie their boot laces, set up an antenna, whatever. And, as you say, the level of detail recorded by the GPS unit can be set to maximum to record a mass of data - but to what end? Who needs such detail, and what are they going to do with it?
“I always set my GPS to record as much detail as it can. A ‘day out’ is typically only around half a megabyte, even in the dreadfully bulky GPX format, and that’s not a lot these days. Tiny compared with the photos I take!” All well and good, but the SMP database is not intended to be a repository of your, or anybody else’s, megabytes of data.
The SMP “Tracks” page was, and is, intended to provide a place where people can upload “tracks” (my word, intentionally vague) which others can use as a general guide to help them plan a trip up to a summit with which they may not be familiar. Note the words “general guide”: an overview, nothing more, of a route to be taken. For such a thing, masses of detail are unnecessary and potentially misleading. An ideal route, track, waypath, call it what you will, featured in the page would consist of no more than a couple of hundred points to mark out the path to be taken. This path will often, but not always, follow some set of easily-identifiable features on the ground: a path or trail, a forest boundary, a stone wall, a mountain ridge. These features make it easier to construct a mental picture of where the route is going/should be going. If such a feature doesn’t exist, then the “track notes” should make clear what the potential activist should do in such a situation. Several thousand points marked on a little glowing screen are no substitute for proper navigational skills with map, compass, being well-prepared (study an SMP track before you set off, for instance ;-)), and a dash of good common sense.
So, SMP “tracks” are intended to be used ONLY as general guides to plan routes, and not to be used as primary navigation aids as in the following scary scenario: arrive at the car park (guided by satnav, naturally), step out of the vehicle and switch on the GPS unit, slavishly follow symbols and directions on the GPS screen without once looking around to see where you’re going, get to summit, activate, return to vehicle following GPS, etc. No skill required, totally safe (you wish!), what’s the point?
I said earlier that nobody has such a thing as a GPS route, since these are rare indeed. However, the Tracks page has tools to enable the user to create such a route, so all is not lost. Let’s say you know of a really nice route up hill XYZ and you want to share it with others. You open the SMP Tracks page, set up the map to show your hill, activate the “Draw Track” options, and away you go: draw a few points, a few dozen, a few hundred points if you will, using the map in the background as a reference, and also your knowledge of where the route goes (you’ve been there, right?). So a track is built up and then you save it to the system. Somebody else comes along who wants to climb hill XYZ, looks at the track you created and thinks that would be a really good route to take to the summit, helped of course by the comments you have saved along with the route. They might even download your track as a GPX file, save that to their GPS unit and use it while ascending hill XYZ - but they would use that GPX-derived route only as a rough guide to ascertain whether they have strayed a long way off the intended route. The GPX-derived route must not be used in such a way as to replace or supplant the map-navigation which the activist should be using.
"ISTM that you are asking for “tracks” but you actually want “routes”. I think of a track as having detail of what you actually did, possibly including wrong turnings and other diversions. A route on the other hand is a carefully selected set of points intended to help somebody else do substantially the same walk. " - I’m well aware of the differences in meaning between the words “track” and “route” as defined in the GPX file format (see e.g. the section in the SMP Help file http://sotamaps.wsstvc.org/tracks.php?z1=h&z2=i), but I wanted to avoid using the word “route” as much as possible to avoid any connection to, or confusion with, Google Maps Routes, which are very different animals. These latter are incidentally featured in the SMP “Range” page…
Finally, although I built into the page a “Upload GPX file” option, I didn’t expect it to be used at all, but it has quickly become the favourite - dare I say “standard” - method of adding tracks to the system!
HTH, 73
Rob
DM1CM
