[Xastir] TOPO MapXchange data, was: Shapefile help

[Kevin Ratcliff]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Curt, WE7U<archer at eskimo.com> wrote:
> 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.

Thanks Curt.

I have used a similar tool called "gpx2shp"
(http://gpx2shp.sourceforge.jp/) for converting GPX files to
shapefiles. It's in the Ubuntu repositories so it's a piece of cake to
install. I tried the Xastir gpx2shape script once on Ubuntu 9.04 but
it couldn't find a required perl module, I think, and I didn't bother
to track it down. It's been a little while since I tried it, so I
don't recall exactly what the error was.

I'm not familiar with the TOPO! sharing site, but there are a lot of
popular trail/trackfile sharing sites now, and many/most of them
provide GPX export capability.

Kevin
KB9MQU