Today we're going to look at gpx files, what are they, how we use them,
and how we use them. No. How do they work, and how do we use them on our motorcycle adventures.
All right, let's take a look.
Firstly what is a GPX file? Well, essentially, it's basically a file format that records a GPS
coordinate as we move through time. gpx stands for GPS exchange format,
which effectively it's creating a format that you can then exchange with other people. It's uh,
it also allows you to create waypoints obviously for points of interest and creates a route. So
it's three separate elements that you'll find in a gpx file, track, route and waypoints.
So gpx has two purposes. One is to record a path that we've been on and then guide us on a route
that we are following once you've recorded a gpx file. You can also export it to visualise
the trip that you've been on. You can use relive or google earth studio etc., to be able to create
a 3d render of the track that you've followed. and of course, the other place we use it is to plan
trips. So we will then create rather than following a path necessarily that someone
else has done. We're going to create a virtual version of a path so that we can then follow it.
When it comes to navigation, really, there are a couple different types of navigation you can
follow. one is live real-time navigation like google maps which is saying I want to go to a
destination and then it constantly works out the best path to follow based on traffic and lots of
other information. Whether you've told it to avoid freeways on tolls and all that sort of stuff,
but it is effectively working out, you know the the the trip live as you're going through it.
now generally, when we use a gpx file, it's actually the opposite. We're setting a path
because we want to follow that specific path. we don't want to work it out live as we're
going through we want to follow a specific path thing about a gpx follow of course
is that it is just a set coordinates it's not necessarily a line from a to b
your the what's stored in the file is effectively coordinate a coordinate b
and then whatever you're reading the gpx file with will draw the line between point a and point b
now when it draws that line if it has the ability to be able to snap to roads or snap to a path
then it will work out a more accurate path rather than by the crow flies and that's where navigation
systems can utilize gpx files and give us an accurate navigation along a certain path sometimes
that path of course when we're doing adventure writing sometimes that path is not there at all
and we're following just point to point in which case you know depending on which software you're
using we're currently using more waypoints than we are gps coordinates however we can still follow a
route it just may not be snapping to a particular path now in this example we're going to have a
look at i love actually i've started using um gm apps gm apps gear mask i don't know how it's
pronounced but anyway i've been using gm apps a bit recently i used to use google maps used to
create a google map but then of course you had to save it in a kml file a kml file is google's
version of a gpx file whatevs but it's pretty much does slightly different things but it's it uses an
xml format as well but slightly difference between a hold and a forward oh mercedes-benz and a bmw
for anyone who's anyone who's you know older than 20 because i then had to convert that kml file
into a gpx file to be able to read it in my gpx in in the navigator i was using what we're going to
do today is create a gpx file then we can export that file and we can send it to our phone to our
navigation apps uh navigation devices you know any navigation device should be able to read in gpx
file all right we're gonna start by creating a new folder let's go old pack to wall and buy save that
so we're going to go new route now first thing we need to do is change this to driving to make sure
it follows the right path following our meet point say we're meeting at 7 11 here and then we'll zoom
out now weekend there's a couple of ways we can do this we can go all the way up to our destination
while i'm by tavern and we can just plot that in there and it's going to find
the route to it so there it's snapped to the roads so it initially creates a straight path and then
it snaps to the roads so it's created that now of course it's going to by default follow the highway
we don't want to follow the highway because highways are boring so we want to instead to
follow the old pack so we're going to then grab this bit and we're going to drag it over to here
that's going to snap to that road instead so here we are again it's done the same up here
from broward we don't want to do that we want to go the old road again for that section there we go
so now rather than just following the route now we also want to go the second the best part
our old pack so we're going to snap to that road too and there we have it so now it's going through
there now again i still i'm missing the top part we want the top part this is the best bit snap to
that right there we go alright so that's following all of old pack now again it's jumping back on the
freeway again up here it's just following what is the shortest path so we're going to select
wiseman's ferry road there and it's going to follow that one instead even along here we can
choose the follow weisman's very right again there
and then the rest it's going to follow the path that we want so that is our path right so now
we hit save saves our route and we can see it see it there that's our that's our path there
let's give it a name uh old pack to warm by save right so this is storing it in
geomaps now revver will do the exact same thing so you can do this exact same process with
river i find personally rather to be a bit of a pain in the ass it's not anywhere near
as easy as that it's a lot more complicated and the way that it does waypoints does the
the points along the way i find that so confusing it's just so difficult i don't know why it just
but obviously they need to spend some money on ui new x because it's just terrible anyway
um once we've got that set we can hit edit i've and you can see we've got our little dots there
so you can zoom in and you can still edit the path again so if you want to take a slightly different
route again we can continue to edit that file and then hit save that saves our path now what do we
do from here we go export as gpx file now this creates a gpx file so let's take a look at what
actually is in here all right so i'm now opening this up in a gpx editor which is
another piece of software that you can buy don't buy just download it it's free um also do you
now you can see there it's created that path and we have a look in here it's actually in there as a
route not as a track let's look at the raw file this is exactly what a json file looks like
the definitions at the top just tell the system whatever system is reading this file what it is
how it's structured and then in here we've got what is a route so then the route within
the json file has the coordinates and it also can specify time as well so it gives you a bit of an
indication of pace and speed and stuff like that but that's essentially the whole file is exactly
all those gpx points now it has created it as a route now depending on the software using some
software's prefer to read routes some prefer to read tracks so if you're using uh uh open source
map a software called ozman or depends on how you pronounce it but it's actually it's kind of an
acronym it means open source map for android but there's an ios version as well so calling it open
source map for android doesn't make sense on on an ios device but it's called odds and or ozmand
depends on how you want to pronounce it but it most definitely prefers to read tracks not routes
the problem with the routes when it's trying to read the routes it reads all those individual
points along the along the route and then it tries to draw a gps it tries to work out the the
navigation between all those points so you can see in here we've got 2652 points so it's trying to
navigate between 2 600 points which takes forever for it to work it out which is quite obvious so
instead what we want to do is actually convert that into a track so i'm just going to go up here
and go convert routes to track convert and now it has it in there as a track instead
now it actually keeps the route in there by the way but for this particular software for osmand
we want tracks not routes so now if i save that go to the raw you can see we've now got tracks
in here so about halfway down i'll convert to tracks so that's our track so we still keep our
route so you can see that that extension means route and then about halfway down essentially
everything's inside a tag so that's the end of the route start of the track so the track starts there
and then we have our track file now depending on the software again which way everyone wants to
read you can choose which one so but i just know with osmand it prefers tracks so you do need to
convert it if you want it if you want to use it if you don't want to take forever if you upload
a tracks file into ozman it'll convert it in an instant if you upload a routes file it'll take
forever so however now that i've got it stored i've got the route stored in in gear maps it
means that i can access that whenever i want now i can then also follow that via the gear maps
Application in ios I have found for me personally on the 12.
I don't know if there's a problem with this particular one with the 12 max. It is really
slow, and it crashes. Now the thing about gear maps, just to quickly show you,
you can then choose different types of maps, which makes it really cool so we can select a topo map
so we can get a topographical view of that route if we want to use that but again this is the
whole point of this is to just store the gpx and create the gpx file, and then we can follow it,
of course, you can then use that to import it into different things so let's bring over the river
so if we go into river and go upload on our file drop that in there and there we have it so it's
actually converted that that file and it's read it but it's created a whole bunch of different
things it's created its own waypoints for some reason let's have a look in here yeah okay so
let's create waypoints at whatever range it wanted maybe that's yeah that's not where i
put the couple of points i think those points are probably where we we selected something and
that one definitely was but then we didn't select anything from there so all these ones it's added
itself interesting and we can then save that away now the other thing i haven't mentioned yet of
course is waypoints so if we go back to here thing with uh gear maps compared to i'm just going to
turn the topo off for a second because it's just hard to read i like the street map one actually
that one's nice and clear all right so saying here we've also so we've set our path now we may also
want to record waypoints as well with gear maps the way it works is we actually want to record
the waypoints uh separately and so we just go waypoint save that there we go start
you can even put a petrol station icon on there save that right so that puts that one in there
and then say we want we want a waypoint at the end as well here's the thing if you're following
a route you actually don't need waypoints but some like it cookie because it's food all right
now i've placed it there i placed it in the wrong spot so i need to hit edit move it to where i
want it and then hit save just say for example you want to set a waypoint when we're at the end of um
to remind us to turn left so we can plonk that there you can even say
turn left if we want to this is just you know this is more for straight line stuff
if you're going from point to point you'd probably use something like this
to tell you to turn left turn right etc so we'll save that away i think i've got this folder
the reason why that's happening i've got the folder set to not visible on the main map which
is why it's doing that it's not it's setting it to invisible so let's go waypoint here i'm going to
put a last waypoint here pie in the sky for more another food option where's the coffee coffee cup
i'm going to set that there we go so that's making it visible straight away okay now the way
gear maps works is that's now created we've got our we've got our route and then we've got our
waypoint separately all right so there we have our route there now we want to
previously we exported just the route and this one we're going to export the waypoints with the route
so let's take a look at that let's go down to here go to folders there's our folder there and if we
scroll down it'll give us distance and we've got our route and we've got our four waypoints
and so from here we're going to go data export gpx
that opens up that one how does this one look in our by comparison okay so we've got there and you
can see our waypoints are listed on here as well so we've got those listed we've got our route and
of course this has re-downloaded it so our track's no longer there so if we do want to send this to
a device that prefers tracks rather than routes we just go convert routes to tracks convert
and then hit save and there we have it so you can then if you want to you can just delete
the route too and just save it as the track and we've got here and give it a name old pack to
while i'm buy there's all our tracks now you can see this in the tracks that it has the markers
for distances so if the device can work out if it knows what the speed limit is on particular
sections then it can work out how long it'll take to pass that that amount of distance or osmond for
example uses an average speed based on you know what you put in for um your method of travel so
you can set up and i think it has a default of card that you can set it to instead take
all right so looking at osmond here we've got our path so i've got this set to car navigation
now if you go to settings and then profile profile that's what i was looking for and then navigation
settings and then vehicle parameters and then default speed i know it's a long way in you can
set the average speed now it will then calculate the time based on that your eta etc so it's a long
way into it but you can also create a separate profile so i've got a profile set up as motorcycle
so then you can set a few other little differences in there and i actually set one for motorcycle in
the country versus motorcycle in the city because in the city i'm doing an average of 40ks an hour
whereas out on the roads we might be doing an average of 80 90 kilometers an hour depending on
where it is so so you can set up different profiles and that's how it'll work out it's
eta based on the points in between that now how do we share it so we've got this file sitting here
i'm going to go to there i'm going to go right click share airdrop send it to my phone boom
phone picks it up i want to open it in osman apps it opens it up right so
there it is straight away there's our path it's following it it's got the waypoints listed out
and then if i go navigation and hit start now that took a little bit longer for a second there
because i'm not at the start so it actually had to navigate to the start and then from there but you
can see that's a hell of a lot quicker than what it does when it tries to calculate the whole thing
so obviously 146 is based on the what did we have in there it was a total of
uh 111 so it means it's 30 odd k's to get to the start of this route and then it navigates from
there so that's that's a really cool option now osmond i've also noticed that when it's recording
its gpx information it it actually records heading as well whereas a lot of apps don't do that
so that's another one all right i hope that helps give you a little more guidance on uh on your
trips and gpx falls is a very easy way to both plan your trips but it'll also guide you along the
way as well as sharing with friends give us a like if that helps otherwise i'll see you next time you