midtoad’s mess.ages
excellence in creative mediocrity

Got a GPS? Want to see your tracklogs on a map? Don’t have money for a dedicated mapping program? You’re in luck - there’s GPS Visualizer. Simply record your trip, upload to your PC using an app like G7ToWin, and then upload to the GPS Visualiser site. Within a minute or so you’ll have a picture of your trip overlaid on a nice map background or on a satellite photo.

One wrinkle is that GPS Visualiser produces its output in the form of an .svg (Scalable Vector Graphics) file. To view the map, you need a free SVG viewer, such as the one from Adobe (which doesn’t seem to work with my Firefox browser; it does work with MS Internet Explorer 6). The SVG map is actually connected to a mapping site to draw your map, so the map is only available if you are on line. However, GPS Visualizer also has a Localize function which will take your saved .svg file and turn it into a .jpg file you can save on your PC and view any time.

BTW, if you need a great little utility to convert between one tracklog format and another, get yourself a copy of the open-source application GPS Babel. It can read and write to/from more than 40 different formats.

Here’s a sample of the work, from a Gold-badge paraglider flight I did at Golden last year:

Compare that to the map produced by See You, below: