Tech | GPS Tracking & Google Earth

I have had a number of GPS devices over the years and have used them for all kinds of different reasons. The latest is using it on my mountain bike to track my speed and elevation and all of those other things that most serious riders probably don’t worry about. A fun thing to do with that info is to load it into Google Earth and check out what your riding area looks like. Here is the file that I uploaded of this morning’s ride. It is a kmz file that will open in your Google Earth, but you might not see it at first. You must pay attention to the top of the GE screen and look for the timeline slider. This is so you can track your movements over a period of days but in this case the tracks were recorded during only a couple hours. So to see the tracks be sure to slide that all the way to the right.

Want to know how to do this with your own GPS?

I personally use all Garmin products, but the process for creating these Google Earth files is basically the same. I connect my Garmin eTrex Legend to my computer and I download the tracks and routes that I have saved to my device; in this case they are the tracks that were recorded from today’s ride. Before I do anything I check to make sure that the tracks seem right in the MapSource software that came with my device. Once I have verified that I have all the right data I save the transfered file as a GPX file. This is a cross-platform exchange file used for sharing this kind of data with different applications. Its handy that Google Earth reads GPX files because this is the heart of the process. Open Google Earth and select File>Open and select the GPX file you just made. Now, open it up! Google Earth may or may not zoom all the way into the tracks that are there but they are in fact loaded. As I mentioned before, make sure that the timeline slider is all the way to the right, which will likely be the date you recorded the tracks. When the slider gets to the date of the recorded track it will light up as a blue line along your traveled route. Now, to save it.

In the menus to the left look for the GPS Device item where you tracks are being held. Go ahead and move it up to your ‘My Places’ directory and name it sometime meaningful, you are about to commit it to your Google Earth collection. Last thing to do is to ‘right-click’ on the tracks you created and select ‘save as’ from the menu. You can save it as a KMZ or a KML. I am not sure where the difference lies but I usually just select the KMZ file.

Thats it, you are done and now you can share you travels with your friends on Google Earth.