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Cleaning up the track

The best way to record tracks (that you plan to publish) with your GPS device, is to record them "cleanly" in the first place:

  • Immediatly before you start your trip, clear the current track in your GPS device.
  • During your trip, when you're at a "place to remember", add a Waypoint in your device, and give it a useful Waypoint name
  • As soon as you have finished the trip, save the current track, and give it a meaningful Track name.

As you can see below, i didn't do any of that in this case: the track is named "MRZ-29-11..." by my Oregon, because i didn't rename it; i forgot to clear the track before i started my trip; and there are no waypoints (yet).

"A trip to go into the trashcan", then? - NO. Fortunatly we can correct all of that in BaseCamp:

 

freshly-imported

 

First of all we'll rename the track to something useful and recognizable: Right-click the track in the lower pane on the left and choose "Rename", or just click on it and press F2:

 

rename-track

 

Next, let's zoom in on the start our track. In my case, this is what it looks like:

 

before-cleanup

 

...this is typical for what you get if you don't clear the track in your GPS device immediatly before you start the trip you want to record, so let's do some cleanup here: Let's get rid of the extra Trackpoints (before and after the "actual" trip) that we don't want in our final track.

To do this, double-click the track in the lower left pane. A new form will pop up where you can see some statistics, and the complete list of coordinates of the track. Let's first set the track color to red so we can see it better on the map:

 

cleanup-start

 

The track i want to publish was actually recorded on March 28th, but since there's trackpoints in there from another, previous trip, BaseCamp happily reports "2 days.." as track time.

So, in order to clean up the start of the track, we need to locate the first trackpoint that we want to have in our final track. If you double-click on a line, BaseCamp will show that point on the map; you can also use the timestamps to find the "real" start.

In my example, trackpoint #68 is the first one i want to keep, so i:

  • click on trackpoint #67
  • scroll up til trackpoint #1 and SHIFT-click that (#1..#67 turn grey)
  • press the DEL key (or right-click and choose Delete from the popup menu)

OK, the start is now "clean", let's do the same for the end of the track:

Locate the last point you want to keep, click the one below that, then scroll all the way down to the very last line in the file, shift-click it and DELete the extra trackpoints you don't want.

After the cleanup, the statistics do make some sense, and the start and end points are about where they should be:

 

after-cleanup

 

(As you can see by the average speed, i'm not in for the Tour de France - i just like to go cycling my way through nice landscapes, and enjoy the nature - "you'll see more, the less you move" :-)

 Next, let's get rid of redundant waypoints inside our track, so our gpx file will become smaller - and the website page with our track will load faster in the end.