GG305 Spring 2010 INSTRUCTIONS FOR USING GPS Utility

Transcription

1 GG305 Spring 2010 INSTRUCTIONS FOR USING GPS Utility This is kind of a cool program (and it s free!). It lets you download information from a hand-held GPS receiver, plot your waypoints and tracks on the screen, and even underlay a satellite image or digitized photo. The full version of the program only costs $55 and if you want it is pretty quick and easy to pay and upgrade to the full version. The program (full version) has been installed on the POST 733 computers so you can skip the parts 1-6 about downloading the program. DOWNLOAD THE PROGRAM 1. GPS Utility is a freeware program - you just have to agree not to re-sell it or edit it - pretty easy to comply with those conditions, I d say. First get onto the web and go to the following site: 2. Click on the Download button next to where it says Download GPS Utility Version (EXE) M (or whatever the latest version is). You will get a Enter name of file to save to window. Pretty much the only thing you need to decide is where you want this file saved to. To do this, in the Save in: box, click on the little down arrow and in wherever you want to save it, double-click that particular folder. Installing on your own computer: It might be easiest to just save it to your desktop, which is usually at the very top of the list you get when you click on the little arrow. 3. Once that is all set, click the Save button and wait until the download is complete. 4. You haven t actually installed the program yet, however. What you downloaded was a group of files that includes the program and a bunch of other things but they re not installed yet. To install the program, get into Explore. You do this by clicking the right mouse button on the Start button way down in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. Slide up and click the left mouse button on Explore. 5. You are now in the file sorting tool and depending on what version of Windows you are in it will look different. Basically what you want to do is find the file: gpsu503setup.exe 6. Once you find this file, double-click on it and follow the typical instructions for installing a program. Say Yes to the questions that ask Yes or No, and say Accept for the questions that ask about accepting things. Eventually, it will create a subdirectory (in your Program Files directory if it is your computer and in z:\gps if you re in POST 733) called GPS Utility. Inside that subdirectory will be a file called gpsu503.exe START THE PROGRAM

2 7. There are a number of ways to start the program. a) The most tedious way is to go into Explore, find the file gpsu503.exe (in the GPS Utility subdirectory), and double-click on it. b) Click the left mouse button on Start (down in the lowest left-hand corner of the screen), slide up to Programs >. Over to the right you ll see a bunch of programs. If GPS Utility is not shown, there should be a pair of double down-arrows and if you slide down to them a longer list of programs will show up. Once you find GPS Utility, hold the mouse over it and a new window will show up with about 4 things listed, one of which says GPS Utility and has a little blue and green icon. Click on it. c) The best thing to do is from the end of either steps a or b above when you finally find either gpsu503.exe or GPS Utility, right-click on it. A window will open up and one of the choices is Copy. Left-click on Copy. Then, out on the desktop somewhere that there isn t already an icon for something, click the right mouse button and the list will reappear. Left click on Paste Shortcut. The little green and blue icon with a label of GPS Utility will now be on your desktop. Now whenever you want to start the program you just double-click the left mouse button on that icon. If you are running the freeware version (on your own computer, for example), after you start the program you have to agree to their conditions by clicking Yes. CONNECTING A GARMIN etrex or GPS-76 TO THE COMPUTER 8. The GPS unit comes with a cable that will connect to your computer. One end is a female 9- pin serial cable and your computer should have the male counterpart somewhere on the back. The place on your computer where you plug the cable in is called a COM port, and it will probably be either COM-1 or COM-2. The other end of the cable is sort of strange-looking with three or four little spring-mounted contact pins, a groove, and a flat area. It is this end that connects to the GPS. 9. On the Garmin etrex GPSs, the connection point is on the top-back of the unit, under the rubber flap. If you open that flap you will see 3 or 4 little round metal contacts. Note that between the two right-most of these contacts there is a tiny raised ridge of plastic. You slide the GPS end of the connection cable onto the GPS from the top down, making sure that the groove on the connector slides onto the ridge on the GPS. Note also that little flanges on the connector should fit into slots at either end of the connection port on the GPS. It is sometimes a pretty snug fit, but don t force it. On the GPS76, the connection is under the rubber flap in the middle of the back. There is a groove and ridge that have to match up. 10. Next, turn on the GPS and wait until it tells you Wait Tracking Satellites. Click on the list icon (upper right) and you will get some choices, one of which is Use With GPS Off. Click on this. If you forget, at some point it will complain that it can t find any satellites and give you a choice to run the GPS with the search turned off. Click Use With GPS Off (etrex) or Start Simulator (GPS 76). RUNNING THE PROGRAM -2-

3 11. Start GPS Utility. 12 a) Click on GPS -> Download All You will get a window titled Untitled.txt - Waypoints. You will also get a GPS Transfer window with a bunch of things checked. It is usually helpful to unselect Current Position/Time. Click on OK. The program will think for a while and suck all the data out of the GPS. b) On most computers you will have connected the GPS cable to COM-1, and that is the default that GPS Utility will look at. But sometimes it is COM-2 or COM-3 or some other. To set up the program so that it is looking at the correct COM port, click on GPS -> Setup You will get an Interface Setup window, where you can change all kinds of things, including what brand of GPS receiver you have and other stuff. I would suggest only changing the box called Com port, and then click OK. 13 a) When the downloading (step 12a) is pau the open window will say Untitled.txt - Waypoints[*], and there will be numbers in it. There is a column for your waypoints (ID), their position (Coordinate), what symbol they are (Symbol), two things I don t know what are (T, O), their altitude (Alt. (m)), and any comments (Comment). b) You will have downloaded all the waypoints and trackpoints that are currently in the GPS. It is important to realize that some of these may be very far apart (more on this in section 15b below). 14. I prefer to change from Latitude/Longitude, which seems to be the default, to UTM. Click on View -> Coordinate Format -> UTM/UPS. Note that in the Coordinate column, you now have the zone, zone character, easting, and northing. 15. If you want to see a map of your GPS data, click on the map button: Or, you can hit the F6 key. You now have a window titled Untitled.txt - Map, and in it are many things. There are UTM coordinates around the periphery. Your waypoints will be shown by little red symbols. The paths you took will be shown in blue, with the trackpoints that were used to define it shown as little blue dots. There is sometimes a second blue line that defines the path you would want to follow if you wanted to retrace your path. Notice that as you move the cursor around, the geographical information in a window near the top changes. You can put the cursor on one of your waypoints and compare the displayed location with that given in the Coordinate column in the text box above. You can zoom in and out by clicking on either the + or - symbols up in the upper right corner. Another way to see detail is by typing Ctrl-z (holding the Ctrl key and typing z). You get a blown-up box that has a high zoom factor. To turn it off, type Ctrl-z again. -3-

4 The thing with all the red arrows allows you to move up, down, left, right, etc. by clicking on one of the arrows. b) One problem that can happen is that if you have waypoints and tracks from two or more different surveys and they are far apart from each other, the program sets up a map screen that accommodates all the points. For example, at one time I had points from UH Mānoa as well as from Windward Community College (WCC) and the program set up a map that included much of SE O ahu. You run into problems when it comes time to print because it complains that the map is too big. Also, rarely is it useful to have a map such as this. Let s say you had points from Makapu u and from Hanauma Bay (although you will eventually have points from Hanauma Bay and points from various sites in California). The thing to do is first save all your waypoints and tracks, regardless of where they are, into one file. Click on File - > Save. Make yourself a data directory in your home directory on bambam. In this GG 305 directory, give the file a name such as allpoints.txt Then use the Save As command to save these same data to a new file name, perhaps Hanauma.txt In Hanauma.txt you can then delete all waypoints and trackpoints that are for Makapu u. You are not deleting anything from the GPS receiver, only from this text file. c) Close the map that showed all the points by clicking on the X in the map s upper right corner (not the X in the upper right corner of the text file). Then redisplay the map by clicking on the map button again:. Now you should have a map of only Hanauma Bay. d) But wait, what is happening??? When you click on the map icon you may still have a map that shows both the Makapu u and Hanauma Bay points at the same time. That is because you probably have track points from both places. Trackpoints are kind of like waypoints but you don t consciously enter them. They are what the GPS uses to draw the little line showing you where you have walked. As you can imagine there are lots more trackpoints than there are waypoints. Trackpoints can cause the same problems of trying to draw maps of too large an area as can waypoints. You are going to have to edit out those for places you don t want included on your map. To edit trackpoints you click on the button that looks like: You do the same thing as when you edit waypoints - delete those for the area you are not interested in (or delete them all). You can highlight multiple trackpoints to delete them all at once by holding the shift key while clicking on the list. To get back to the waypoint editing spreadsheet, click on: e) If you wanted, you can then make a map with the points from Makapu u, you would close everything and then re-open allpoints.txt. This time use Save As to save the file as Makapuu.txt and then delete all the waypoints and trackpoints that deal with Hanauma Bay. Leave allpoints.txt alone so that you can always come back to it to get what you need. f) A final thing that sometimes messes you up is if, in step 12a, you downloaded the Current Position/Time. I m not sure how the GPS figures this out, especially if you are in a building, but -4-

5 the map tries to include it as well. To edit (get rid of it) click on: the point. and in the spreadsheet delete g) After each of these edits you need to create another map. The best way to do this is to close the existing map and then click on again. 17. You can change all kinds of things in the map display. To do this, click on Options -> Map Settings. You will get a Option Settings window with all kinds of choices. You can pick what to display in the Include box at left. a) One thing that is cool is to show the time that you were walking by having tic marks displayed at regular time intervals. Under the Tracks section in the Include box you will see Tics at. Click on the little arrow and slide to a time interval that you would like to display. b) To define the Track you walked, the GPS collected Track Points even when you were not saving Waypoints. You can choose to display these by clicking Points in the Tracks section of the Include box. c) You can also change the colors of the things that you display. Near the middle of the Options Settings window is a Colors box. Here it shows what colors each of the features on your map are being displayed in. To change one of them, click on the color swatch itself. You will get a Color Dialog window that shows the color being used. You can change the color by clicking on a different one. If you don t like any of the choices you can click the Edit button. You then get a Color Edit window where you can mix combinations of red, green, and blue. d) The only other thing that might be worth playing with is the thickness of the Track line, which by default is pretty thin. To do this, look in the Appearance box of the Option Settings window. You will see Line Thickness with a window and up and down arrows. I ve found that a line thickness of 2 works pretty well. e) OK, I lied - there is one more setting to pay attention to. When it comes time to register an image to your GPS data, the more registration points you use the better. GPS Utility allows you to use up to 4. If the images you re using are not distorted you can get away with 3 or even 2, but for now set it at 4. To set this, look down in the Map Calibration box in the bottom center of the Option Settings window. f) Make sure you have only Hanauma Bay data, and save the file as Hanauma_no_bitmap.txt g) Close the map and then close the waypoint spreadsheet. 18. One of the coolest things you can do is have your GPS data overlain onto some sort of bitmap image. This can be a digital photo, satellite image, scanned topo map, etc. But be careful - don t -5-

6 use tif images or else the program will crash badly!! Create a new folder called GG305 in your directory on bambam. Then in GG305 create a folder called Hawaii. Look in the Hawai i directory of the following website: and save the file: HBay_map_small.jpg to your Hawaii folder in your GG305 folder. a) In GPS Utility, open Hanauma_no_bitmap.txt b) There are two things regarding these bitmap functions to keep in mind if you are using the freeware version of the program: First, it doesn t allow you to change bitmaps once you have used one for a particular something.txt file. So always make sure you have a copy of something.txt without a bitmap using the Save As command (you did this already and it is called Hanauma_no_bitmap.txt). That way, if you decide you want to change bitmaps, you don t have to go all the way back downloading all the waypoints from the GPS. c) The second freeware bitmap limitation is that there is a 2000 sample x 2000 line limit to the bitmap file size 19. Sometimes (such as today) rather than an image of some sort you have a scanned topographic map. Or, you didn t mark on the image where your waypoints are. It is often difficult to mark exact waypoints on a map while out in the field but if your map or image has latitude/longitude or UTM gridlines or points on it you can still register it in GPS Utility. Essentially what you will be doing is creating (in the GPS Utility program) fake waypoints that have coordinates that correspond to known geographic grid points. a) First take a look at the scanned map or image and select two or three or four grid intersections. The number you select needs to match the number of registration points you selected in step 17e. It helps to draw yourself a diagram or mark the actual paper copy with what you will pick as waypoint names. Note that HBay_map_small.jpg has UTM gridlines superimposed on it. Select two, three, or four places where there are crossing points in the UTM grid, and circle them. Ideally, these should be near the four corners of your map, but not the four corners themselves. Label them NE, NW, SE, and SW as appropriate. Then, on a separate sheet of paper, list the Easting and Northing coordinates of each of these 4 points. b) Make sure the window with the waypoints spreadsheet is activated (as opposed to the window with the map). Click on the waypoint editing button:. Then in the main GPS Utility menu click on Record -> New. You will get a Data Dialog window. Fill in all the correct values for Zone, Easting, and Northing, and give it an ID name (NE, NW, SE, or SW, as appropriate). Then click on OK. c) To import an image, first make sure you have a map displayed (click on ) and that it is the front window (i.e., overlying the text window; click on the color banner along the top). Then up in the main GPS Utility menu, click on File -> Load Bitmap You will get a Open window that allows you to search around in various disks and directories for bitmaps. Navigate -6-

7 to your Hawaii folder in your GG305 directory. Depending on what kind of bitmap you are going to use (.bmp,.jpg,.gif, etc.), you may have to change the filter. Using the Files of type: box, click on the down arrow and slide down to whatever file type you need. There is only one file in there now, and it is a.jpg image. Once you find it, click on it, and then click Open. d) The image will be displayed under the tracks and waypoints. You will get a window titled GPS Utility that says something about calibration. For now, just click OK. e) Make sure that you can see both the new waypoint you are going to register first and the location on the underlying bitmap where it needs to go. If you can t see both of these, use the zoom and pan buttons until you do. Next double click in the spreadsheet window on one of your new waypoints, or on the map double click on one of the points itself. You will get a Data Dialogue window. In it will be a blow-up of the part of the image that the waypoint is in and next to this are 8 arrows pointing in various directions. The process is to click on these arrows to move the waypoint until it lies directly over the correct pixel in the image. Because the little zoom window is so small it is kind of hard to see where you are within the image so it helps to also look in both the little zoom window and the main map window. You can go outside the little zoom window and it will redisplay. When you finally get to the right position, click OK. You will get a window that will have various titles, depending on where you are in the registration process. One that you ll get is a Warning window, that says: Yes to move calibration point OK to change coordinate values as well Click on OK. Repeat the process for the next one or two points that you want to use for coregistration. Eventually you ll get to a point where you have registered the two, three, or four points and after clicking OK, you have a registered version of the image and the GPS data. f) Once you ve finished step 19e, save the file as Hanauma_bitmap01.txt Then close the file and the map. 20. The steps are the same if you actually know where your waypoints are in the image, except that you don t need to create new ones at grid intersections. a) To import an image, first make sure you have a map displayed (click on ) and that it is the front window (i.e., overlying the text window; click on the color banner along the top). Then up in the main GPS Utility menu, click on File -> Load Bitmap You will get a Open window that allows you to search around in various disks and directories for bitmaps. Navigate to your Hawaii folder in your GG305 directory. Depending on what kind of bitmap you are going to use (.bmp,.jpg,.gif, etc.), you may have to change the filter. Using the Files of type: box, click on the down arrow and slide down to whatever file type you need. There is only one file in there now, and it is a.jpg image. Once you find it, click on it, and then click Open. b) The image will be displayed under the tracks and waypoints. You will get a window titled GPS Utility that says something about calibration. For now, just click OK. -7-

8 c) Notice that the underlying image is not in the right position relative to the GPS data in your map. This is because GPS Utility doesn t know anything about the geographic location of the image (it hasn t been geo-registered). In fact, GPS Utility doesn t even know that this is image is a map - for all it knows, it s a digital photo of your pet iguana! GPS Utility does know the geographic locations of your waypoints, however, so if you can relate waypoints to points in the digital map image it will then be able to correlate the two. The easiest way to do this is to move waypoints to the right locations in the image. This is why it is important to mark on the hardcopy where your waypoints are when you are out in the field. But there aren t any meaningful landmarks on this map, so this doesn t apply. So skip down to step 19. d) First, decide which 2, 3 or 4 waypoints you want to use for registration. You should pick points that are as far from each other as possible so that you tie in as much of the image as possible. Also, you don t want them to be along a straight line. e) Next, make sure that the image location of your first registration point is in view (sometimes part of the image and map are out of view because the map window is too small). Use the sliders on the bottom or right to bring the correct location into view. f) Center the cursor over the first waypoint you are going to use for registration and click the left mouse button. You will get a Data Dialogue window. In it will be a blow-up of the part of the image that the waypoint is in and next to this are 8 arrows pointing in various directions. The process is to click on these arrows to move the waypoint until it lies directly over the correct pixel in the image. Because the little zoom window is so small it is kind of hard to see where you are within the image so it helps to also look in both the little zoom window and the main map window. You can go outside the little zoom window and it will redisplay. When you finally get to the right position, click OK. You will get a window that will have various titles, depending on where you are in the registration process. One that you ll get is a Warning window, that says: Yes to move calibration point OK to change coordinate values as well Click on OK. Repeat the process for the next one or two points that you want to use for coregistration. Eventually you ll get to a point where you have registered the two, three, or four points and after clicking OK, you have a registered version of the image and the GPS data. g) Save the file as Hanauma_bitmap01.txt Then close the file and the map. It is important to do this lining-up as carefully as possible because this will determine the fit between your GPS data and the image. But wait, make sure the map datum and your GPS datum are the same!! The GPS is hopefully set to WGS84. HBay_map_small.jpg is also WGS84, so you should be OK. But if you have a scan of the new USGS Topo quads, they re in are NAD83. Bummer? According to: -8-

9 there is only a 1 meter difference in x, y, and z between the two so within the uncertainty in any scanned image this can probably be ignored. Note that you cannot ignore the difference if you have an older Topo Quad using Old Hawaiian coordinates because they are many meters: Conversion of Old Hawaiian mean datum to WGS84* Island Ellipsoid dx (m) dy (m) dz (m) Hawai i Clarke Maui Clarke O ahu Clarke Kaua i Clarke mean for Hawai i, Maui, O ahu, Kaua i Clarke *(numbers > 0 are added to Old Hawaiian Mean to get WGS84, numbers < 0 are subtracted) 21. Save your data!! You will notice that the program hangs when you try to exit. It is attempting to write a file to the drive where it is installed (C:), which you cannot write to. This is kind of unsatisfying but there doesn t seem to be a way around the problem. The program will end once you log out. -9-