Messages

Hi Al,
I'd definitely be interested in seeing your final product once you get the gpx files converted. I'm the webmaster for wilderness.net, so I'm glad you've found our KMZ files useful. If you have a Garmin GPS that will read maps, we also have the same boundaries available for download that way at http://www.wilderness.net/GPS/. With respect to GPX though, I'm having my GIS person work on a script to export to GPX straight out of ArcGIS for either a selection or for all 757 wilderness areas at once. That way each time I update our data, which is frequently, I won't have to do these by hand. Please contact me once you have your conversions done so I can look at them: [email protected]. Thanks!

We are definitely going to strip out any internal geometry (donut holes such as inholdings) so that shouldn't be a problem. I did try importing this boundary as both a route and a track onto my gpsmap 60csx and it truncated both at 250 points. Even if I set the map page to show the maximum number of track points (10,000), it still truncates imported tracks. I'm guessing that there's a difference between the number of track points you can actually log on the unit (quite large) versus the number of track points you can import to your unit (250 or less/track). Can anyone verify this?

I'm in the process of creating Garmin compatible maps of wilderness areas by state (see California Wildernesses, which is the first state that I did), but I also want to provide a more universal option for people who don't have Garmin units or to use for other purposes. So I thought about using gpx.

Here's the dilemma though: Wilderness boundaries aren't really tracks or routes and they're large  and complex enough geographically that generalizing them to any significant degree results in too much loss of detail. Ungeneralized boundaries, however, contain thousands of points and, as I discovered when I tried to transfer a test file to my GPS unit (gpsmap 60csx), units truncate at 200-250 points. So I created the attached file that breaks a single boundary into multiple routes, each with less than 200 points. This file is of the Rattlesnake Wilderness in western Montana.

Is this the best format for maximum compatibility with a variety of GPS units and other devices?