GPS for Dummies.pdf - Engineering Surveyor

Chapter 4: Grasping Important GPS Concepts79Don’t confuse a route with an autoroute, which applies to GPS receivers thatcan provide you with turn-by-turn street directions to a destination you’redriving to. AutoRoute is also the name of a Microsoft European street mappingprogram.Routes can be created ahead of time or entered while you’re traveling. Likewith waypoints, after you create a route, you can delete or edit it, includingremoving or adding waypoints within legs.Whenever you’re using a route or navigating to a waypoint, you don’t need toleave your GPS receiver on all the time. You can shut it off every now and thento conserve batteries. When you turn the GPS receiver back on, just selectthe waypoint or route that you were using, and the GPS receiver recalculatesyour present position and gives you updated information about how to reachyour destination.The number of routes and the number of waypoints that a route can consistof vary from one GPS receiver to another. Some inexpensive GPS receiversdon’t support routes, but a high-end consumer GPS unit might have up to 50routes with up to 125 waypoints in each route.Making TracksRemember the story of Hansel and Gretel, the kids who dropped breadcrumbsin the forest to try to find their way back home? Their story would’vehad a different ending if they had a GPS receiver because all newer GPSreceivers leave electronic breadcrumbs (called tracks or trails depending onthe manufacturer) while you travel. Every so often, the GPS receiver savesthe coordinates of the current position to memory. This series of tracks is atrack log or track history. (Because various GPS models handle tracks differently,check your user manual for specific details.)Note these differences between tracks and waypoints: Names and symbols: Although tracks and waypoints are both locationdata points, tracks don’t have names or symbols associated with themand can’t be edited in the GPS receiver. Autocreation: Unlike waypoints — that you need to manually enter —tracks are automatically created whenever a GPS receiver is turned on(that is, if you have the track feature enabled).If track logging is enabled, tracks are shown on the GPS receiver’s map pagewhile you move, like a trail of breadcrumbs. The GPS receiver constantly collectstracks while it’s powered on, so you need to clear the current track logbefore you start a new trip. If you want, you can save a current track log.