Article Index

Page 4 of 10

Editing the track: adding in Waypoints

Waypoints ("WPT" tags) are -basically- just positions, or pairs of coordinates. They can have timestamps, symbols, and some more additional information attached to them. They are not a part of your track, but you can include them in a GPX track file.

Think of it this way: When you have a printed map hung up your wall, and you push a pin into it - the exact position where you do this on the map: that is a Waypoint.

There are (at least) two ways to add Waypoints in BaseCamp: 

1. With the "hand" tool, click a trackpoint on the track (a circle and a popup will appear). Then click on the grey double arrow and select "Create Waypoint"

 

add-waypoint

 

2. Using the "New Waypoint" tool, click on the map where you want the waypoint to be:

 

new-waypoint

 

However you do it, this is the result:

 

waypoint-unedited

 

Now either double-click the entry in the leftmost list, or click the name of the waypoint on the map to bring up the waypoint properties editor. Here you can change the name of the Waypoint and give it a custom symbol (we'll get back to that later). I want to include a photo in the popup, and it really is a scenic place, so i choose that symbol.

(Note the little hint window saying "Scenic Area" - remember that text, we're going to need it later on!)

 

waypoint-properties

 

As you can see, BaseCamp also holds a timestamp for the creation date of the waypoint.

The plugin can show the waypoint name, the elevation, that timestamp and the description (from the "Notes" tab, see below) in waypoint popups. If you have created the waypoint during your trip, it will already have the correct timestamp, and also the correct elevation. When you add the waypoints afterwards - like i'm doing here - the bad news is: BaseCamp won't let you edit the timestamp. I have no idea why they did this (you can e.g. edit the elevation) - so you'll probably want to disable the timestamp display in the plugin options. (You can edit the timestamp by directly editing the GPX file, but not in BaseCamp).

To find out the correct elevation (altitude) of your waypoint, select the track and locate the trackpoint in the Track editor (the one we used before to clean up the track). Here you can see the elevation of the Trackpoint where you put your Waypoint on - just enter that same value in the Waypoint properties: in my example "440 m".

 Next we're going to enter a description for the waypoint.