GPS Track Log Viewer

Upload track logs from your GPS, and view your track overlaid on a map next to your planned route. Load them into Google Earth directly from this site, and share them with your friends and family.

goFLYING: GPS Track Log Viewer

(via Flightnest)

:: I'm addicted to Google Earth. Today I came across this, which may be the coolest, most useful mash-up I've ever come across.

Many of us have gone down the road of GPS geekery. We've downloaded track logs from our handheld GPS unit after a flight, then imported them into a mapping program to show the ground track we flew.

The image above is a 3D representation of a recent sortie we flew during a SAREX. (An electronic search for a practice ELT beacon.) You can see how we narrowed it down to an orbit around that little airport pretty quickly.

It pretty easy to see how using this tool could really streamline post mission debrief, when in a few short minutes the de-briefer could download the route flown, and examine the actual flightpath in 3D to help determine search effectiveness.

As a SAR / DR Mission Pilot in training, I plan use this to enhance my post flight analysis of my performance in the left seat.

The hell with the you-know-what software that we've been promised for so long. This combo does it for free and you don't need a security clearance to use it. All we need now is some programmers to use the Google Earth API to build in some mission planning tools like CAP Grids, etc.

...and by the way, this would work just fine for Ground Ops too!

Comments

[Major Carrales]

Golly, what will they think of next?

I will say this, if one cannot master technology...they will never master 21st Century life.

Plus, google earth is cool!!!

Major Carrales

[Blackwing]

I've been investigating using Google Earth and other GPS utilities for SAR purposes for some time, and while the Apollo GX55 units in the corporate birds obviously record a tracklog, I've not been able to find a means of extracting it from the unit. There exists an RS-232 port on the back of the unit, but I've not been able to find anyone who knows if the data can be had via that port. So, I simply run an external antenna to the back window and use my handheld GPS receiver to record this info.

Someday, I'm hoping to help CAP catch up with this stuff.