[Xastir] TOPO MapXchange data, was: Shapefile help

[Curt, WE7U]

On Tue, 16 Jun 2009, Kevin Ratcliff wrote:

> The Indiana Department of Natural Resources produces a shapefile (and
> associated metadata) of public recreational trails in Indiana. This is
> very useful for SAR, and I'm trying to use this shapefile in Xastir.

Speaking of "useful for SAR", I've done a cool trick with files from
mapXchange, which is the National Geographic "TOPO!" site where
people share their recorded GPS trails with others.  The trick is:
Use a very recent "gpsbabel" to convert the data to "GPX" format,
then use xastir/scripts/gpx2shape to convert to Shapefiles.

A few years back we started creating pre-plans for our most
"popular" search areas in our county.  For the first test case the
team decided to draw the search segments on a large paper map, draw
those into "TOPO!", and ultimately drew 511 lines and saved them to
a file.  A lot of work, but it would have been a lot more work to
hand-draw the exact same lines into Xastir myself.

Somewhere along the way a new module got written for "gpsbabel" that
knew how to read "TOPO!" version 3.x and 4.x save files...  I was
unhappy that they had used a proprietary program so that was my
solution.

So...  If you find a trail or trails that you'd like to hike and
want to see it in Xastir on top of Xastir maps or satellite images,
use the above method to convert the data.

NOTE:  This does NOT allow you to do anything with the maps in topo,
just the saved user data which is freely shared via the above site.
No maps involved, just trails/waypoints/routes.

Now that I try to find mapXchange again, I can't, so perhaps the
trails are available at another site now.  Looks like _maybe_ TOPO
Explorer at topo.com is the new site?  Anyone know?

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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