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Normal use: Simply connect your GPS, and wait for the track to be downloaded while giving a description of it. To download Waypoints and Routes, see the GPS menu. Clicking left button zooms in, right button zooms out. Double click will zoom to fit the track. The same zoom-rules go for the Graphs. When pointing in a graph, the actual location will be marked on the map if it is visible on the screen. Use the View menu to switch the graph window on and off. Options dialog:  Here is a short description of the choices you have in the options dialog. (Menu: Edit.Preferences) Position format: The presentation of positions in status bars, Waypoint dialog etc. (To enter a position, you may use any of these formats) Speed/Distance format and Altitude unit: These settings enables you to choose your desired units when Exploring your GPS information Cruising speed: Click this button to set the Cruising speed. The Cruising speed is used when dragging the right mouse button, and when drawing a route. In both cases it calculates the estimated time needed to cover the indicated distance. Length of speed arrows: You might find the unit of this setting a bit strange. The value you specify is the time you would need to travel the distance of the speed arrow at the current speed. The speed might be your current online speed, or the speed at a pointed spot of a track. Time between tracks to reset Odometer: When pointing on a track, you will in most cases see an odometer showing the distance from the start of the track to the pointed position. But where is this start of the track? It could have been the start of the technical tracklog, but that would in most cases not be the desired start, because your track might have been split due to different reasons, like tunnells, changing track settings, running out of batteries etc. If this value is for example one minute, any break in the track with duration less than one minute will be considered as one track, and the Odometer will not be reset. (You also have the trip counter, giving the distance from the start of the track selected in the graphs.) Grey lines outside graphs: Your selected tracks will be colored. You can choose if the non-selected tracks whould be drawn or not. Ignore timeless tracks: When you save a track in your GPS-receiver, most receivers will delete the time information of the track. It is also deleted if you upload a track to the GPS-receiver from your computer or similar. If the "Ignore Timeless"-checkbox is checked at the time the download of tracks is finished, the timeless tracklogs are deleted. Limit selection of tracks to one directory only: Will not use all your calibrated maps when finding best map for a position. It will only use the directory containing the currently selected map. Auto select map on new views: When opening new windows or starting the program, this setting will make the program try to search for a map. Othewise, a white map will be displayed, even if a scanned map exists for the indicated position. Start download on Open com, new document: If this box is checked, a download of tracks will automatically start when the com port is opened for a new document, and a GPS receiver is properly connected. An exception for this rule is the case when the GPS-receiver is tracking satellites and moving. In that case the online position will be logged, and you will have to use the GPS-menu to start downloads of the track. Open Com Port on new document: To be able to communicate with the GPS Receiver, the Com Port must be open. This checkbox will make it open automatically if it is not occupied by other applications, or other documents in GPS Map Explorer.  Pos indicator: When pointing a track, the pointed position will be indicated by a chosen indicator. Here you can choose the indicator, and the size it should have. Size graph Y: By checking this box, the size of the indicator will change according to where in the graph you are pointing. Pointing in the top of the graph will give twice as big indicator. In the very bottom of the graph, the indicator will get its "real" size. A car will for example be around 4 meters long. This will be "very" small on a world map, but if you zoom in to a photo of your property etc, it will still be visible. Note: The size of an indicator will never be smaller than its "real" size. This is undependant on all the size settings. You see it if you zoom in very much, or if you make a large custom indicator (see below). Custom indicators: To make a custom indicator, simply use MapSource or GPS Map Explorer to do the following: 1. Make a Waypoint named "RefInd". (This will be the center of the indicator.) 2. Make one or more routes surrounding the waypoint. (Lines of indicator) 3. To scale the indicator, name two of the waypoints as follows: One should have the name "SA", the other one "SB" + 'distance from "SA" in meters', for example "SB10" if the distance between "SA" and "SBxx" is 10 meters. Save the file, and open it from the selection of position indicators. If all route points are EAST of the RefInd-point, the lines will be mirrored to the left side of the point. In that case, all route names starting with "C" will have continous lines between the left and right part of the symmetry. Track thickness: This thickness value is used three places: 1. On the tracks drawn on maps 2. In the graphs 3. On the routes drawn on maps Track background thickness is an added thickness of white color. This is useful if your map has several colors, and many of the colors are equal to the track color. Track color: You can use different color rules for your tracks. If you have used GPS Map Explorer to download the track, you can also specify a custom color for each GPS receiver. (See Menu: GPS) That's all about the Options dialog. File storage: You choose where on the disk to store the log files (txt etc), and the document files (gmx). In addition, the program will create a new backup folder on your computer: "C:\Temp\AutoLogs\OnLine". If using the program On-line, this folder will contain a track log containing position, altitude, time and epe. You may open or import these files to view them. The folder "C:\Temp\AutoLogs" will also contain backups of downloaded logs. If you normally save your downloaded and on-line information, you may at any time safely remove the folder "C:\Temp\AutoLogs" and all subfolders of it. File Open / Import: The difference between Opening a file and importing a file is mainly that importing a file will add the imported information to the current GPS document. Opening the same file will make a new empty document before reading the information. If opening, you can only choose one file. When importing you can choose several files in the file selection dialog. This is useful for example if you have several MapSource documents containing tracks from different GPS receivers used at the same time. If you drag a file from your file explorer into the GPS Map Explorer, the file will be opened, not imported. Background maps: The recommended file type for background maps is jpg. You may also use gif, bmp and dib. Bmp and dib are not recommended. If you want to use maps calibrated in older versions, on other computers, or in Ozi, you may import the calibration info you have exported or stored as clb or map-files. If you have maps for Ozi, they may be opened directly if they are of type jpg or gif, and they are located at the same folder as the .map-file. If they are of type ozf2 or similar, you must use the "Save as bitmap"-feature in Ozi, then convert the bmp-file to jpg (use the program you would prefer to do that), and save the jpg-file with the same name as the original file (except the extension). Calibration of maps: To calibrate a new map, choose Tools.Calibrate, and click the map, or drag a track or waypoint to the place where you know it belongs. You may move a calibration point, but each time you click outside an existing point, you create a new one. To move a calibration point is a heavy operation. Therefore it is smart to use a track that is not too long. A size of 500-1500 points is recommended. The track should cover the scanned map. If your track covers much more than the scanned map, you may use the first choices on the Edit menu to remove parts of the track. If you want to import calibration info for a map, you must remove all existing calibration points on the actual map. Otherwise the imported calibration information will be ignored. That is to avoid your calibrations to be corrupted. To remove a calibration point, first click it on the map, then click the remove button. You may use decimal values on the pixels for the calibration point. If using integer values, the point will be placed in the upper left corner of the pixel. 0.5, 0.5 would be in the middle of the upper left pixel on the map. If choosing the "Scale" projection type (recommended) you will get guidelines between the calibration points that shows the actual lines used to calculate a point. Moving a calibration point will affect the trackpoints or waypoints being inside the polygon connected to the calibration points surrounding the one being moved. If the moved calibration point is an "outer limit" point, moving it will affect all calculations outside the calibration lines. You should never move a calibration point across a calibration line. It is even worse if you make the calibration lines cross each other. If something like that happens, you should delete calibration points until you have control of where they belong. You should avoid a passing calibration line to go very close to a calibration point. To do that, you may give the line from one point to another lower or higher priority. The priority may also be used to tune the calibration of a map that is a combination (merged) of several scanned maps. If choosing the "North up" projection, you may use a maximum of two calibration points. Use this projection if using maps you have "Print screened" from other map applications, like Map Source etc. You may of course also have scanned a map where all latitudes are horizontal and all longitudes are vertical. They also have to be evenly spaced to make this work. The "Fast scale" projection uses the same method as the one used in the prototype. It is faster, because only two calibration points are used at a time. The two nearest ones are always used to calculate a point. This one is not recommended, but may still be useful to save time when calibrating. You should normally switch back to "Scale" before finishing the calibration. Improving your calibration of a map is something you do as time goes by. If you download a track, and see that parts of it is wrong, you may at any time choose Tools.Calibrate and drag the track to its correct place. By doing that, you have improved the general calibration of the map. Avoid having too many calibration points on one map. There is no limitation, but the performance will be reduced as the number of points increases. Up to 20 calibration points are OK, but if you pass 40-50 points, the speed of the program will be reduced considerably. For Example files, simply take a look at the folder "Examples" where you installed the software. Waypoints / Routes: The same dialog is used for Waypoints and Routes. You may click on the map while the Dialog is shown. That will create a new waypoint or select an existing one. On the right side of the dialog you may control and manage routes. If "Add" or "Insert" is selected, any clicked new or existing waypoints will be added to the selected route. You may always see the length and estimated travel time of the route. Checking the "Navigate" Check box will make the Auto Pilot follow the selected route. File search for tracks near the selected Waypoint: When a waypoint is selected, you may click the "Search" button at the top of the Dialog. You will then be asked for the distance from the waypoint you want to define as a search area. You may also limit the search to a certain speed and heading interval. At last you are asked to select the files you want to search. You may search multiple files. Ctrl-A will choose them all. Choosing very many files may be time consuming. At last you get a summary containing a list of the files containing tracks near your waypoint. Entering positions: You may enter positions manually. The position must be entered in Latitudes and Longitudes, or UTM-coordinates. You may use any format of the ones selectable in Preferences, or you may copy and paste a position from Geocaching. Examples: N60 E5 (deg) N60.5 E5.4 (deg) N60.52633 E5.43621 (deg) N60 30 E5 20 (deg min) N60 30.000 E5 20.000 (deg min) N60 30 0.0 E5 20 0.0 (deg min sec) N 78° 11.246 E 015° 33.495 (Geocaching) 32 V 302538 6673106 (UTM) Auto Pilot: You can make your own Auto Pilot for your boat. Simply use the DTR (pin 4) and RTS (pin 7) signals on your com port to control an engine moving or trimming the rudder to the left (DTR) or right (RTS). (Pins are referred to for a 9-pin com port with ground on pin 5.) Use two micro relays on the port (with diodes or optic connectors between), and two normal relays to give power to the engine. For more details, see the Auto Pilot page. If you don't want to make all these connections, you may use the program as it is, and be guided how to steer in the status bar. At the bottom of the Auto Pilot menu, you can tune the Auto Pilot Settings, to fit it to the size of your boat, and the properties of your rudder engine. The Auto Pilot has three main functions: 1. Follow active route in GPS (NMEA only) 2. Follow the route you have currently chosen to navigate on your map 3. Keep the heading Joystick: Pressing button 1 on the joystick will Enable or Disable the Auto Pilot. While it is disabled, you may use the joystick to control the rudder engine, and optionally the speed of the boat. (Parallell port pin 1 and 2.) This is useful if having a wireless joystick connected to the computer. You may also assign the buttons of the joystick to some functions in the program, and to output on some of the pins on the parallel port. The joystick must be connected when you start the program. To calibrate your joystick, use the Windows Control Panel. It is very important that it is properly calibrated, Good luck! |
Updated: June 13 2004