Light-weight GPS tracking

Thanks pmcke for that makes sense now,i have found in the Hut section GPS Positions for all the huts on the Hollyford and they use NZGD49 and NZGD2000 Datums This is what i will do When i get to TeAnau.I will put in the positions for all the huts and when i get to the start of the walk i will put in the start position,so in theory the track line should end up near the hut positions and i will redo the hut positions when i get to each hut If there is a better way to do this let me know Lindsay

If you want the official locations of any huts, go to http://www.zenbu.co.nz and type in the name of the hut or type "doc backcountry huts". The data here comes straight from the DOC database. If you join (it's free) you can export that data in a number of formats (including GPX) and use it any way you want. If you find any innacuracies you can go to the zenbu site and login and fix it. Everything is in lats and longs (wgs84) but once you have exported the data and put it into a GPS program (eg Garmin Mapsource) then you can do anything you like with it.

Great site thanks for that pmcke

Great stuff. I fixed the position of Ranger biv. It is now accurately marked as being on the true left of that tiny stream which is more of a seepage actually. It had been marked as being on the true right so has now shifted about 5m over!

One little thing about moving things around on Zenbu is that it is projected onto Google Maps, which are not entirely accurate in themselves. On the whole I have found the positions as loaded into Zenbu as being pretty good. They have usually been confirmed by a DOC employee with GPS in hand. Remember if you find any good cafes, tourist sites, pubs, shops, anything. Add them into Zenbu. I often pick up business cards from these places and add them in. All the locations in Zenbu end up in the Open GPS Maps of NZ http://nzopengps.org/ so will be well used there.

Does anyone have a KML for google earth that shows all the hut locations? I have done the north island, but would like the south. I think it's time to take my tramping a bit more serious.

I have a gpx, which I can probably convert to a kml. Think I have your email address somewhere. I'll see what I can do

thanks

You will have to pm me your email address. Or you can do it yourself with Zenbu. You would have to create a login, then search on "doc backcountry huts". When the search displays go to the bottom and you will see an export link. One of the options is kml format. But pm me your email and I will send you what I have here.

Haqii -- have you tried going to Zenbu (as pmcke noted earlier in the thread) and just asking it to export to KML? It works for me, but perhaps it's not the exact info you're after. pmcke could also verify how useful it'd be. If you have what you want in some other format, you could use something like GPSBabel to convert it. http://www.gpsbabel.org/ In other news, I'm glad I settled on a GPS that'll take a memory card! I went out for a 6 hour daywalk this afternoon, and the track log on the el-cheapo eTrex I've borrowed is 83% full. I could move it into one of the saved track positions then clear the active log, but I've noticed that when it saves tracks, it seems to cull out the date/time information for each track-point. Unless GPSBabel is culling it for some reason without me realising.