How Fast is my... Share your GPS tracks

This is an intentional split of the "how fast is my F18" thread...

There is a site, Motionbased, now owned by Garmin, that allows you to post and share your GPS tracks. It attaches weather/wind data to your tracks so you can compare conditions. You can sign up for free and keep up to 10 tracks. It takes a monthly fee to keep more.

See my track from last month's Green Island Race on Lake Erie at Green Island Track There are many tools you can use that help analyze your route. For sailing routes, it is really cool to use the "map player" (using Internet Explorer). Switch the background in the left frame to "photo" and select "speed" in the zones drop down. Then hit the play button.

Short story about this race are posted at My Story Other stories posted by Jamie Diamond and Mike Fahle at http://sailocra.com/

This is a screen shot from the service (Deleted by forum administrator because of over-width)... to actually use it, you must follow the link above (green island track).

Cool but I'll take look at Motionbased later. Till then here is some data distilled from a track in September.

/Martin

Martin, that looks like a nice tool as well. I will give it a try as well.

Hey, I'd like to play this game too. Are we restricting this gps thread to F18's?
Here's one of mine. It is on a Mystere 6.0 with no spinnaker, broad reaching:

Returning from Catalina Island

Here's another with no spin, because I broke a halyard.
Return From Santa Cruz Island

Nice and easy spinaker run on a mild day

GARY

That is why I split this from the F18 thread... to just post various recorded runs on any boat. Mine was from an F17 in pretty rough water.



You were smokin' Did the water get progressively flatter? Your speed started at a low teen average and increased to a screaming 20.

It would be interesting to have a PC package that could take data from several GPS units and play them together...you could really see how a race plays out and would be extremely interesting....

We already do have a place to upload *.xml files that are full of gps track records from a group event and see them play out over a back drop of google earth. Thanks to California cat sailor Glenn Brown for building this program and offering it on the internet.

He provides instructions on how to tweak your browser (IE) so that you can play your file from your own host, on his player. Once you have made it work properly, you can send him the file and he may place it on his server so that others can view it without having to tweak their browsers.
Glenn's instructions

Here is an example. This is a file where we had a few boats loggning their tracks on a Catalina Island trip. Glenn Brown's gps track player

GARY

They did not get flatter. The combined seas got progressively larger as the wind increased, as far as I can remember. The cause of the 18-20 mph burst, (besides the skipper's incredible prowess) <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" /> is that we were arriving at "Hurricane Gulch." The topography of the Cabrillo Beach area creates a funnel of wind.

I have uploaded our complete track to include our beat up through the gulch at the Motion Based site. Here's the link: "Whisk" with no spinaker

Mike, do you think that you can go back and edit your post so that the included picture is a bit narrower? I thihnk that it is causing this entire thread to go past the constraints of my display setting and making me have to scroll left and right to read the text posts. It affects the remaining thread in its entirety and hopefully this is an ongoing thread.

GARY

I don't get the Edit option now... not sure what the rules are for returning to edit.

My boat is 18 feet wide:
http://hem.bredband.net/b262106/

/Martin

I belive GPS Action Replay does that for you and it is a Java application so it works on virtually any platform. I run it on my Linux box.

/Martin

I believe GPS Action Replay does this for you.

/Martin

I have downloaded GPSActionReplay... I already had the Java Run Time installed so it was quite easy to install. I am running WinXPro and had no problems. The generation of the polar diagram is really nice.

It would be cool to take several boats... H16, F16, F17, F18, N20, A, T, etc. on a consistent wind day and have them go through a couse intended to fill out the polar.

Here are two tracks for the Tri-Point Ocean Race. There are some rocking speeds coming back in from the back side of the island with the 2005, the 2006 had some great averages too.


2005
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/invit...cePk.pkValue=11

2006
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/invit...cePk.pkValue=11

Links people...please! <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

If we get this simple enough, I might be able to generate the runs of one or more boats after each tybee leg on www.teamseacats.com

http://gpsactionreplay.free.fr/

Another useful tool when loading from different devices, or if you need to convert from one format to another is G7towin
http://www.gpsinformation.org/ronh/

Thanks anyway, for trying Mike. I think that the edit option times out after a set time period. Maybe our hosts will change that someday.

GARY

Mike,
I deleted the picture from the message text, so this thread would fit on the screen widthwise. The same picture is still in your attachment, though.

It was me, Mary, who did the deletion, so if it is a problem, complain to me and not to Rick.

Thanks Mary. I'll just leave it as an attachment.

Geee...uuuhhh...Mary, you should get some coffee...

Jake, I thought it was me seeing it that way! Guess its not just me:)

That's my Halloween mask. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

That sounds like a good idea for the organizers... Download everyone's tracks after each leg, and put them together on this for the "Race recap report"

Ya ya ya Jake; links. Here's your link. This is a link to MB that demonstrates how you can match two tracks against one another, even if they are done at a different time.

For direct, boat to boat comparison, you would have to cooperatively upload tracks that all begin at the exact same time of day. MB seems to "dot race" the tracks by starting all compared tracks at the begining of each track, regardless of the time of day.
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*edit* Nevermind. I found the button on MotionBased that says "real time." That should take care of any sychronization issues when comparing tracks. GARY
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Four tracks at one time - Channel I... County, Los Angeles County, California.

GARY

For coordinating tracks, you can either edit your tracks to have a common start time in MapSource or you can export into xml or txt and do the same. Once that is done, you can import into MotionBased... you may have to convert it through G7toWin as the MotionBased import is not too forgiving. Just remember that MotionBased needs an Active Log, not a saved track. Saved tracks loose some of the timestamp data that is needed to drive MotionBased graphing.

keep getting an error message when I want to start the race what do I need to do.

CAjohnes,

you need adobe svg player in IE explorer.
http://www.motionbased.com/support/homeView.mb

I have Firefox as my default browser - many of the MB features won't work - anyhoot Cool - looks like my 2005 race was way fastrer than 2006.

Thanks for posting that

Use knots in your speed claims, we are sailors! 1 knots is one nautical mile / hour. One nautical mile is 1/60 of a degree so it all matches nicely for navigation. On land we use km/hour or miles/hour but on water use knots!!

(20 mph is 17.36 knots and 20 knots is 23 mph)

/håkan

On land we use km/hour or miles/hour but on water use knots!!

Hakan,

I sure hope you would be able to forgive me if my use of mph was offensive. I was replying to another fellow who used it and it was a remark about a speed that a website (motionbased) had used to show my speed.

I usually use knots, but have found that the majority of cat sailors who I have spoken with, usually quote mph when talking about speed on their cats. One way or the other, there will be some people who need to know how to convert.

LOVE!!! your helmet cam videos Hakan.

GARY