Saving Waypoints to a Separate (or Internal) File

[Chris Bobay]

We presently use stand alone Garmin eTrex receivers to gather travel time data, which is then brought into TS/PP-Draft for processing at a later date. One constant irritation in our procedure is that we need to have the GPS receiver (containing the gathered field data) connected at all times to the CPU for ‘polling’ so that relevant waypoint data can then be downloaded for association to each applicable arterial and intersection so that travel time data can be calculated and viewed in the reports. There does not appear to be a single download procedure where the waypoint data (either embedded into the TS/PP-Draft data file or saved and later referenced to a separate data file) can be geographicly tied to each applicable intersection without constantly polling the GPS receiver. Trip logs can be downloaded and saved into the TS/PP-Draft data file, why can’t the waypoint data? Am I missing something or can the TS/PP-Draft program be updated to either embed or reference waypoint data from another source besides the actual GPS receiver (obviously this data needs to be downloaded at least once)?

[bullock]

There are two options here. After downloading the waypoint data into a .Dgm file, you may either

Use File: Save As... to save the coordinates and node numbers to a text file. Be sure to change Save As Type to Coordinates File. Or,

Use the CopyFromDgmFile utility to copy the coordinates from the .Dgm file to any other .Dgm file

Either way, you'll need to ensure that each intersection has a unique and nonzero ID. Both methods transfer all coordinates for all nodes; they use the intersection ID to assign the coordinates to the appropriate node.

The next version of TS/PP-Draft will offer more options and several improvements for collecting and assigning coordinates to intersections.

Regards.
Greg