[Paddlewise] Paddlewise waypoint exchange

From: Evan Dallas <Evan_Dallas_at_notes.ntrs.com>
Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 12:47:34 -0700
I have an idea that may or may not be practical, but I'm wondering whether
other Paddlewisenheimers would be interested in some sort of organized way
of exchanging waypoints for seakayaking.  For example, I've got a fair
collection of waypoints in Clayoquot Sound, Desolation Sound and the Broken
Islands for things like launching sites, camps and points of interest.

I'm not sure what the best way would be to manage and access all this (I'm
just the "idea" guy, after all).  One option is to have a list member (such
as me) volunteer to be the "Waypoint Keeper" and when someone's getting
ready to explore an area, he or she sends a request to the Keeper to see if
anyone has submitted waypoints for the area of interest.  If there's a
"modest" interest for this, the whole collection might fit within the
typical 500 waypoint limit used for many GPSs and the keeper could just
email the whole database to an interested Paddlewiser.  If there's more
than a modest interest (more than 500 waypoints), perhaps they could be
organized by geographical region (such as British Columbia) or even a
narrower region (such as Clayoquot Sound).  In this case, it may work best
to have different waypoint keepers for certain regions, however we would
want to define this.

As most GPS users know, there are a variety of formats for communicating
GPS data, so there'd probably have to be some consensus on what format to
use.  I use the generically named "GPS Utility" program (
http://www.gpsu.co.uk) to store my GPS data on my computer (since the basic
version is free, works well with my eTrex, and allows 3-point map
calibration), but I know there are several other systems such as Ossie
Explorer (sp?) available.  I believe most of these seem to communicate
fairly well with each other.

What do you think?

Evan Dallas
Woodinville, Washington

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Received on Fri May 24 2002 - 12:48:21 PDT

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