gps tracks with graphs and labels in google earth

SHORT VERSION:

Please download this zipped up KML file and have a look!

hoponline.com.au/seabreeze/GPSdevice-Graph.kmz

LONG VERSION:

I have a BGT-11 thats a few years old. It makes GPS tracks fine with the 1sec polling as per usual.

You get a bunch of NMEA sentences as the plain text output. The job is done but what is the best way to view the data?

I've been able to make GPS tracks in Google Earth (GE) using gpsbabel and been happy with the blue line that comes out. However what's missing is the speed info. It's hard to tell where exactly where the max speed was.

I've seen programs that have a graph down the bottom of speed vs time, and an x-y plot above to show you roughly where you are. That does the job but its still presenting the info in two parts.

So, what I'm leading up to is that I've always wanted to just dump in a bar chart right into GE to give a 3d overview of what happened. I finally sat down today to look and of course someone out there has already done all the hard work. The site is:

www.sgrillo.net/googleearth/gegraph.htm

I got the program and after playing around I finally got what I wanted. I won't go into detail now because I'll type a 10,000 word essay but please ask if you need help and I'm happy to reply via this post.

About this GPS run: Coila Lake, March 2009, speeds in kph, rider = not me!

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hi nebbian,

thanks for the interest.

gpsbabel can save as "tab delimited fields" which you can then load in a spreadsheet. note i start with NMEA sentences which seem to have a good amount of data. i use a BGT-11 so am not sure about other devices and settings you might need to set to get the most data you can.

from there copy / paste the four columns from left to right "index / lat / lon / speed" into a new sheet so they are all next to each other.

(optional - convert the speed to a different unit)

make sure the lat / lon has not been rounded during the spreadsheet import. see the square in the pic is over the 000's icon to shift the rounding.

then select those four columns and hit copy only.

then goto gegraph and say "paste from clipboard" and they should pop into the program. delete the header row if there is one.

the hard part is done. now it's the settings. have a look at mine. i choose:

graph type = 3d, 4 sided polygons
size = constant
height and colour = value
colour scale = any
auto colour scale = yes
size = 50cm
height = NO auto scale (too big) use 1 to start and adjust to suit
labels = place value (not name)
open in GE = yes

update GE to v5 and now hit run and it'll prompt to save as kml, then open in GE. if you change the gegraph settings (colour, height, etc) don't close GE, make sure "temporary places" is selected in GE, then just hit run in GEgraph again, and you'll get a few overwrite prompts, just say yes and yes and it'll refresh in GE.

note that with kml files, if you zip them, just rename the .zip file to a .kmz file and it will still load with GE (inbuilt unzip) and it's much smaller.