lostatsea

having trouble ploting locations on google earth maps because my GPS (hand held Garmin) seems to round up from seconds to minutes in incriments of 100 seconds and Google earth roungs up in 60 second incriments resulting waypoints being off. Any advise?

HumVee

lostatsea, I'm sure someone would be willing to help you - but be advised that cross-posting (asking your question in more than one forum in GPS Discussion) is forbidden by the rules.

iamasmith

Really? Could you give an example of this? There are always 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in a degree.

Co-ordinates in GPX files and KML files are ALWAYS transferred in decimal degrees rather than degrees, minutes and seconds and then they are simply interpreted by the display setting that you set.

Note that the Google Earth default is to display decimal degrees whilst the Garmin default is degrees and decimal minutes. You can change either the Garmin device or change Google Earth's output format (useful if you work a lot with co-ordinates given in Degrees and Decimal Minutes like on the Geocaching web site).

Oh, and if you are connecting the GPS directly to Google Earth then the data is coming in as KML. All Google earth does is start a copy of gpsbabel (that it ships with) and creates KML files when you read data from the GPS. If you turn on live tracking it does this every few seconds to generate an updated KML file and imports that looping this behaviour to give the impression that GE is doing all the work. Kind'a sounds a bit cheeky that they used to make people pay for that feature doesn't it

Regards,

-Andy

lostatsea

Thank for the info, I may try to change the Garmins output format and see what happens. Do you think it will influance my waypoints I already have saved?
Robert

lostatsea

Also the example you requested. The GPS output looks like this 31 06.890 and I guess it really updates every 1000 incriments.

lostatsea

Thanks inasmith, I changed the output format of google earth and it fixed the problem