Tag Archives: GPX File

Planning Multi-Day Cruises—Example Revisited

A few years ago I wrote a series of articles about planning multi-day cruises. I finished off the series with an example. See Planning Multi-Day Cruises—Example. Since that time, I created a user-friendly GPX tool. So now I revisit that example.

The example walks through finding anchorages, planning a route between them, refining the route, cleaning up the route, documenting the route, and adding it to a chartplotter. What has changed is the GPX Tools that I use to clean up the route and document the route in a spreadsheet. I now have more user-friendly GPX tools.

There are two ways you can continue reading this post. You can go to the original post here and follow it to the heading Cleaning the Route, skipping the section on GPX Tools, or, you can download the route that was created by clicking here.

This route, named WP-OWW, was created and refined using OpenCPN and HomePort. This post continues after the section titled Exporting a Route from HomePort.

Cleaning the Route

I open the GPX Tool. I have it installed as a shortcut on my desktop. Alternately, I can point my browser to questeria.info/gpx/.

I click Chose File, and choose the file named WP-OWW.gpx. Then, I upload it to see the contents of the route.

Uploaded Route

I scroll down to the last entry, and see there are 11 waypoints in the route. The names are random, except for the starting and ending anchorages. There are two waypoints in the file that correspond to the two anchorages. I can download a CSV file now, but I want to clean the route before that. First, I set some options.

Setting Options

I click Show Options and the Options panel appears. The first set of options are formatting choices for the CSV file. I set Lat/Lon format to dd mm.mmm and Distance to Naut. Miles. Depth and Time Set are options for tracks, so I leave them alone.

GPX Options

The last set of options are for route cleaning. I check Reorder, Clean Sym, Hide Name and Clean All. I set Num Digits to 3 and Symbol to Waypoint. These are the default options that I used last time.

I click Hide Options to save the values and continue. I set Start Num to 400. This is because my previous routes start at 0, 100, 200 and 300.

Clean Route

I click Clean Route to clean the route.

Cleaned Route WP-OWW

The message says 11 waypoints out of 11 cleaned and Start Num is updated to 411.

I scroll through the route and it looks like the cleaned route from the original example, but I want to redo it using a different option.

Clean All Unchecked

I click Clear to restart the whole process. Then I click Show Options and uncheck Clean All. This tells the GPX Tool to ignore the two anchorage waypoints. I click Chose File, select WP-OWW.gpx, and click Upload GPX as before. I reset Start Num to 400. Next, when I click Clean Route, the message says 9 waypoints out of 11 cleaned, and everything is reordered and cleaned except for the two anchorage waypoints.

Clean All Unchecked

Downloading the Files

Next, I click Download CSV and it downloads a file named WP-OWW_cln.csv to my Download folder and disables the Download CSV button.

Then, I click Download GPX and it downloads a file named WP-OWW_cln.gpx to my Download folder and disables the Download GPX button.

Importing Cleaned Route

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You can now go back to the original example header Importing Cleaned Route, but I do things a litte differently below.

Importing to OpenCPN

I import the cleaned route back into OpenCPN. I delete the old uncleaned route to avoid confusion. I right-click on it and select Delete… I get a message “Are you sure you want to delete this route?”. I click Yes. Then, I open the Route & Mark Manager and go to the Routes tab. I click Import GPX…, and select file WP-OWW_cln.gpx in my Download folder. I get a message that 2 duplicate waypoints were detected and ignored. I now have a route named WP-OWW. I open the route’s properties and notice that some of the original information has been lost or changed. This is caused by importing it after it was exported from HomePort.

I restore it to its original state. I put West Pass in the Depart From field and Okeechobee Waterway in the Destination field. I change Color from Magenta to Default color and click OK.

There are still some differences. The waypoint symbol is now Combo! and appears as circle with a dot. Also, the Show name box is checked for each waypoint. I can manually change each waypoint property, but I can do them all at once with the GPX Tool.

Recleaning the Route

I export the route from the Route & Mark Manager by selecting WP-OWW and clicking Export selected… and save it to a folder. Then, I open the GPX tool and upload the file I just exported.

I click Show Options and uncheck Reorder, and check Clean Sym, Hide Name and Clean All. I also set Symbol to diamond.

Reclean for OpenCPN

I click Hide Options and Clean Route, and Download GPX. Then, in OpenCPN, I delete the old route and import the re-cleaned route as before. It all looks good.

Importing to HomePort

I import the cleaned route back into HomePort. I delete the old route to avoid renaming due to duplicate names. I open HomePort and click on my Route2019 list. Then, I right-click on route WP-OWW and select Delete. I get a message saying “Items will be deleted from ALL lists.”, I click Delete.

To import the cleaned route, I click File and select Import into Route2019… I select file WP-OWW_cln.gpx and click Open. Surprisingly, it doesn’t make a difference if I use the original cleaned file or the one I recleaned for OpenCPN. This is because HomePort ignores Show name and waypoint symbol diamond. It knows about the starting and ending anchor waypoints because I already imported them into Route2019. I select WP-OWW_cln.gpx. It looks good.

To send this route to the SD card, I right-click on route WP-OWW and select Send To… I click on USERDATA, and then OK.

I can now put the route on my chartplotter, see Saving Routes and Waypoints to Chartplotter. I can also copy it to my ActiveCaptain App, see Copying Route to ActiveCaptain App.

Organizing Routes in a Spreadsheet

You can now go back to the original post heading, Organizing Routes in a Spreadsheet, but I do it a little differently below.

When I have all the routes for my trip, I like to organize them in a spreadsheet. You can use Excel or Google Sheets. I use both. The first step is to get a template. I have a shared template on Google Sheets here. Start by copying it to your own spreadsheet. I’ll name mine Example RouteSheet. The spreadsheet has a template sheet, named RteFormat. The template has six rows of header. The first step is to customize your template. Change speed of 5.5 in cell D3 to your planned average speed, in knots. Then, change your Start, cell C4, to your planned departure date and time, for example “11/21/2021 8:30”. This field can later be modified for each route.

I keep RteFormat sheet as is, and duplicate it to create a sheet for each route in my trip. To start, I click on the RteFormat sheet and select Duplicate. Then I click on Copy of RteFormat and select Rename... I give the sheet the same name as my route, WP-OWW.

I go to my Download folder and open WP-OWW_cln.csv with Excel and I see this.

Spreadsheet

Next, I copy the route information into my sheet. I copy all the cells in columns A through F, starting with row 9, by dragging my mouse from corner-to-corner to highlight the data, right-clicking and selecting Copy. Then I go to WP-OWW sheet, right-click on cell A7, and select Paste. Finally, I type the route name, WP-OWW, in cell B1, the starting point, West Pass, in cell B2, and the destination, Okeechobee Waterway, in cell F2. I update the speed, in knots, in cell D3, and the start time, in cell C4, if needed. The other fields in the header are computed by the spreadsheet; Total distance of 60.04 nautical miles, in cell B3. Total time of 10 hours, 55 minutes and 1 second, in cell F3. End time and date of 11/21/2021 19:25:01, in cell F4.

Example Route Sheet

I’ve shared my completed route spreadsheet here.

I’d love to hear what you think about the GPX Tool. Leave a comment to this post if you have any suggestions. I am planning to write more posts about the GPX Tool. You can subscribe below to receive an email notice when new post are available.

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Clean Route Tool

I had some minor issues with routes that I created for my chartplotter. The method and tools that I use creates random waypoint names. I can fix them manually, but decided to create a tool that can do it all at once. It’s a Perl script called “clnrte”. The first version renamed the waypoints, starting at a specified number and incrementing it for each waypoint. Next, I had it replace different waypoint symbols with a specified symbol name. Then, I had it hide the waypoint names on the display.

Later, I decided that I would make this tool available on my website. There was a problem with this—it was the ease of use.

I wrote Clean Route using a language called Perl. The Perl Language is very good at reading and manipulating text files, which is why I chose it for the Clean Route tool. Perl programs require a Perl interpreter, which can be downloaded for free, for personal use. They are also portable across multiple operating systems, like Windows, Mac and Linux. I already had it installed on my Windows PC when I wrote the Clean Route tool.

The main disadvantage of Perl is that it runs from a command prompt. I spent much of my career running programs from a command prompt, so this was never a problem for me. But I understand why most people don’t want to do this. I provided a “bat” file, so the program could be started from Windows Explorer, but this is not portable and it doesn’t allow for running with different options.

The Clean Route program takes options, which are passed in as command line arguments, in the style of the UNIX shell. If running from Windows Explorer, the default options can be changed by editing the “bat” file. That’s about –3 on a usability scale of 1 to 10.

For documentation, I provided a small “txt” file, or you could run the program with the “–help” flag, as shown below.

>clnrte --help

clnrte (Clean Route) Version: 1.05
Copyright (C) Ron Olson 2014

Reorder waypoints and clean symbols in GPX route files.
Syntax:
   clnrte [options] infile1.gpx [infile2.gpx ...[infileN.gpx]]
   Where infile1.gpx ... infileN.gpx are route files in GPX format.
Options:
   --help or -h - Display this message.
   --outfile or -o - Output File (optional), default is infileX_cln.gpx,
                     (does not work with multiple input files).
   --reorder or -r | --noreorder or -nor - Reorder | Don't reorder
                                  waypoint names (default is to reorder)
   --start or -s # - Starting waypoint number, if reordering, (default is 0).
   --digits or -d # - Minimum number of digits in waypoint name, if reordering
                      (default is 3).
   --cleansym or -c | --nocleansym or -noc - Clean | Don't clean waypoint
                                      symbols (default is to clean symbols).
   --wpsym or -w 'string' - Waypoint symbol, if cleaning symbols,
                            (default is 'Waypoint').
   --verbose or -v | --noverbose or -nov - Verbose | Nonverbose mode.

These bits of documentation do not cover how to get started running Perl.

The New GPX Tool

One day, out of nowhere, I had an idea…

The server that runs my website has a Perl interpreter. All I had to do was upload a GPX file to the server, run the program there, and make the output available for download.

I started with my other GPX utility “gpx2csv”, or Create CSV file from GPX file. Since I now have a easier way to specify options, I made some improvements to the CSV tool, like specifying different units of measurements. I also displayed a summary of the GPX file.

This was my first release of the GPX Tool. See my post GPX Tool for a description of the Create CSV part of the tool.

In release 2, I added “Clean Route”. I made some improvements to this utility as well.

Clean Route

Clean Route came about because of the way I create a route for my chartplotter. I start by creating starting and ending waypoints in OpenCPN. I connect the waypoints with a route, and then insert waypoints in between to keep my route at safe depths. The inserted waypoints are automatically named by OpenCPN. When my route looks good, I export it and import it into HomePort. Then I continue to refine it. HomePort automatically names inserted and appended waypoints as well. Refer to my series of posts on Planning Multi-Day Cruises for more details.

The route is slightly changed when exported/imported between tools. While OpenCPN is tolerant of duplicate names, HomePort is not. When Homeport imports a route with an existing waypoint, it appends a digit to the name to make it unique. It can get very messy.

HomePort and OpenCPN share some common waypoint symbols, like Anchor, but most of them are unique. Routes exported from HomePort use waypoint symbols named Waypoint, which is a black dot. Waypoint gets converted to Combo!, which appears as small circle with a dot in the middle, when imported into OpenCPN. OpenCPN lets you specify the waypoint symbol, but the default is diamond, which is not a valid symbol in HomePort.

Inserted and appended waypoints in OpenCPN default to not show the waypoint name, but you can change this by checking Show name for each waypoint. When you import a route into OpenCPN that was exported from HomePort all the waypoint names are shown. This clutters up the display. You can uncheck Show name for each one, or you can use Hide Name to hide them all.

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I added another option to Clean Route. Originally, all waypoint names were reordered and all waypoint symbols were cleaned. I added the Clean All option. If Clean All is unchecked, non-automatic waypoints, like anchorages, are left alone.

Cleaning a Route

To clean a route, start by opening the GPX Tool and setting the Clean Route options.

Click Show Options and check/uncheck Reorder, Clean Sym, Hide Name, and Clean All. Also set Num Digits and Symbol to desired values.

Clean Route Options

Click Hide Options to save and continue.

Click Chose File and select a GPX file with the route to be cleaned.

Clean Route Chose GPX File

The Upload GPX button is enabled.

Clean Route, Upload GPX Enabled

Click Upload GPX to upload the file for processing.

Clean Route, Uploaded GPX File

If there is a route, the Clean Route button is enabled. The Start Num field is set to one past the last waypoint name from the last route that was cleaned. Change it now if desired.

You can also download the uncleaned CSV file, if desired.

Click Clean Route to clean the route.

Cleaned Route

The message tells you how many waypoints were cleaned. Start Num is updated by this amount.

Click Download CSV and Download GPX to download the cleaned CSV and GPX files.

The file name is appended with _cln, but the route name is unchanged. I suggest that you delete the original route from HomePort and/or OpenCPN before importing the cleaned route.

Click Clear to restart any time during the process.

Summary

I hope that you find my tools useful. If you want to try them out, you can download an example route, MAR-FTJ.gpx by clicking on the name. This is a route from Marquesas Key to Fort Jefferson anchorage, in Dry Tortugas. Look for more examples in the future.

Speaking of future posts, you can now sign up to receive a notification when a new post is published.

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