Route creation in OziExplorer

I used to manually create my routes in OziExplorer by hand.  I would open maps along my approximate route in OziExplorer and create waypoints, which would get strung together as a route.  This was tedious to say the least, and often ended up in using Delorme for street driving, and Ozi for off-roading (or when the streets didn’t show where I was correctly).

I knew there had to be a better way, and had often though about exporting my route from Delorme Streets into OziExplorer.  Well, I have finally found a fairly easy method using Google Maps (likely will work for Delorme as well).

First, get yourself to this page the home of GMapToGPX, and follow the instructions to add the GMapToGPX bookmarklet (an application stored as a bookmark) to your favorite browser (I used IE7).

Next, get a set of directions from Google, it might look something like this:

Now click on your new GMapToGPX bookmarklet (for IE, in favorites), and you should get a screen something like this:

Click on the button that says “Full” at the top, which gives us all the points in the track instead of only some of them.  Copy the resulting text in the window out to a file, call it whatever you like, say something like estimated_track.gpx (make sure to give it the gpx extension).  You can do this step multiple times, if you want to create a couple of alternate routes — say you want a route that avoids highways or tolls for example.  Just save each, and its corresponding waypoints.

Then click on the same button (but it now says “points”), which will give us the turning points as waypoints, again copy out the text to a file, say turn_points.gpx or something.

Then, import the files into OziExplorer by going to File->Load from File->Import GPX, and you should have something like this:

In the Route Editor, double click on the first unused route (R0 in this example), give the route a name and description.  Select all (if this is all the waypoints currently loaded in the map, otherwise choose them carefully).  Then add them to the route.

Start up everything (GPS etc) and start the Navigation Control and tell it to start navigating along the route.

Related posts:

1. New Maps added!!