Welcome to the Northwind 2010 Seminar "Secret Page"

Through out the course of conducting the seminar we told you we "post" on our website copies of some of the slides that were not completed in our workbook, listings of resources (hyperlinks) for finding "shape files" for various states, and a review of the "work around" for transferring waypoints from Google Earth to your GPS. 

Shown below are the 3 slides that were shown in part 1 of the seminar, but the text had not been completed in your workbook:

 

 

How to transfer your waypoints from Google Earth to a GPS:

In this example we will walk through how to transfer the waypoint we created named NWE Office from Google Earth to a GPS.

Notice in the “screen shot” below the thumbtack icon labeled NWE Office and the file of the same name under My Places. 

 The next step is to save the data as a KML file. You can do this individually for each waypoint, track, etc. by right-clicking on the name of the point or track in the Places window on the left of your Google Earth screen, selecting “Save As …”, and the choosing KML as the file type. However, you can also group all the waypoints, etc. together, and save them in a single file. Right-click the Places window, choose Add=>Folder to create a new folder, name it whatever you want, and then drag and drop the points and paths you’ve created into this new folder. Then save the folder as a KML file.

Once you’ve created your KML file, you’ll need to convert it to a GPX file. To convert your files you can use a free program called GPSBabel that is available online at www.gpsbabel.org.   After downloading and installing gpsbabel to your computer, open up GPSBabel, set “Google Earth (Keyhole) Markup Language” as the Input file type, and select the KML file you created as the input file. For the Output file type, select GPX, and specify the filename and where you want to save it. Click on “let’s go”, and GPSBabel should create a GPX file for you.

Now open the GPX file you’ve just created in the software you use to upload data to your GPS unit (ie. MapSource if you have a Garmin gps).  If you don’t have mapping software you can download a program called EasyGPS from www.easygps.com .  If you choose to use EasyGPS, you’ll see something like this when it opens:

 The next step is to open the GPX file you saved from the previous step and the waypoint will appear on the EasyGPS “map” as shown below:

Notice that the waypoint is named with the name assigned it in Google Earth.

Finally, hook up your GPS unit, click on the Send button at top, and all the data on the EasyGPS screen will be sent to your GPS.