The Gift of Navigation

First published in OutdoorX4

Big government and big business: both lauded and reviled depending on which side of the political spectrum you fall on; both forwarded as the instigator of many of the current ills in the world, or heralded as its savior.

But what if I told you that both had a hand in making what is one of the most valuable technologies for overlanding, and they gave it to us for free? Sound outlandish? Stay with me.

Let's start with government. In the latter part of the last century, the United States military saw a need for a navigation system that would allow its forces to find themselves anywhere on the planet and navigate easily to anywhere else. It started in the 1960s with the TRANSIT constellation of five satellites, which allowed ships to verify their location once an hour. By 1985 this idea had grown through systems called Timation, OMEGA, and SECOR to a constellation of 10 satellites called NAVSTAR-GPS. NAVSTAR allowed real time position tracking for anyone on earth with a receiver. Initially the receivers were military only, but in 1983 a Korean Boeing 747 was shot down by the USSR for straying into Soviet airspace, and President Ronald Reagan (republican) issued a directive that GPS be allowed for civilian use ‘as a common good’. The civilian GPS industry was born, only hampered by ‘selective availability’ which degraded the civilian signal compared to the military signal. That ended in 1996 when President Bill Clinton (democrat) issued a directive switching selective availability off. We now have a global navigation system maintained by the US military that is a free utility for all humanity. GPS receivers are in many devices, and location information has become part of the fabric of our lives. You may not be able to imagine your life without GPS, because you probably don't realize how ubiquitous it is, but you can certainly try.

Now on to big business. In the aughts, a small company called Keyhole, Inc. was developing geospatial visualization software under funding from the CIA. They developed an application called Earth Viewer that displayed geo-referenced satellite imagery onto a 3D globe allowing the user to explore a virtual planet Earth. By 2004, the company had been acquired by Google, which was expanding at a staggering rate and becoming a global powerhouse. Google changed the name of Earth Viewer, and Google Earth was born. Google decided to make Google Earth a free download under their freeware license so it became another gift to humanity, or, at least, anyone with a computer.

Now admittedly, both of these 'gifts' could be withdrawn, but not without considerable cost to the benefactors. Put them together and you have two of the foundations of navigation: position (given by GPS) and location (given by Google Earth).

Some may think that these two gifts have made exploration less audacious, easier and have lessened its allure. I would argue, that with these two tools in our toolbox, we can explore more and more efficiently, can enjoy the experience more and lastly, can record our adventures for others better. True, a long expedition in Africa no longer requires a trip to the RGS in London to pore over maps that only a select few have access to, but I don’t see that as a problem.

Let’s take a closer look at Google Earth for overland expeditions. I break it down to two areas: pre-trip planning and post trip recording. I don’t currently use Google Earth much while traveling, because it requires a network connection to use effectively. Sometimes I do use it when an Internet connection is available, but I never rely on this.

For pre-trip planning the value of Google Earth is huge. The imagery available may not be from yesterday, but in just about all cases it will be more recent than the most recent published maps. This means tracks and roads show up more in real time and in areas of the world where dirt roads dominate, this can be invaluable for route planning. In deserts and jungles, the terrain means that people try to find the easiest path, and in these two landscapes specifically, that means tracks splinter into a web that can obscure the general route when you are on the ground. The top down view provided by Google Earth allows the linking of a web of tracks into a route with the judicious placement of some waypoints.

In deep jungle the road may not be completely visible, but a few waypoints placed where it can be seen are gold for navigation on the ground.

A second pre-planning use is for ingress and egress from cities and towns. In much of the world, street signs are an afterthought, and main routes through towns are not continuous. Rather a main road will dump you at the edge of a city where a maze of small roads explode into what can become a frustrating and time-consuming ordeal to find a way out. Again, looking top-down in Google Earth will allow you to mark intersections and plan a route through the city while also allowing waypoints to be dropped at stores or gas stations for possible use along the way. At the very least a waypoint marking the road out of town can provide something to aim for that can be invaluable. Picture two shows an example of a few waypoints dropped in Managua Nicaragua. Our planned route came in on Carretera Nueva Leon (Hwy 26) at NP-016, and we planned to get out on NIC 4 on the other side of town. As shown in the picture, four waypoints provide a pretty easy way across the town without having to search for street signs or ask directions (not that either are bad, this just makes it that much easier).

Placing ingress and egress points in cities and towns can save hours of frustration.

The ability to drop a waypoint anywhere on the planet in Google Earth is also invaluable. It used to be that people would scour various travel forums looking for waypoints for border crossings or embassies, but now a few minutes on Google Earth and you can generate the waypoints for yourself. It is also nice to have waypoints for critical junctions as shown in Picture four where I marked a junction on the Pan-American Highway where we needed to turn left towards the border. In this case it was well signposted, but it is nice to have a waypoint marker just to keep on track. Another example of this was on a safari drive in Zimbabwe where I marked several watering holes, a junction and a river crossing. Again, really nice for reference when on game drives.

It may seem from my examples that Google Earth is only good for international travel, but that is far from the case. The high-resolution images of North America allow all of the above to be done for local trips as well.

Of course, the waypoint is only as good as the data it is based on and there are many mistakes in the Google Earth data set, so be careful with navigation data as always.

That’s an overview of uses for pre-planning, but as mentioned I also use Google Earth a lot for presenting and recording post-trip. Picture one shows 21,392 miles of track log imported into Google Earth from a London to Cape Town trip in 2004. It makes a great slide for presentations and web pages, and the distance measurement of 21,392 miles is actually off the info provided by Google Earth. Picture five is a slide I used for a presentation on guiding in Africa. The red track shows a short loop that we travelled when we encountered two lionesses. I was able to pick out the exact tree one of the lionesses was sitting under, and measure the distance to where we saw her -- 30 yards, made more dramatic given that we were on foot.

The Mechanics of Google Earth

All of the examples I have used so far break down to two operations in Google Earth. The first is setting waypoints (Google Earth calls them placemarks) and exporting them to your GPS or navigation device. The other involves importing track, route, and waypoint information from your navigation device to Google Earth. In both cases it is a matter of getting the correct file format, but there are a few tips and tricks that I can impart. To start with, Google Earth stores all the information you generate in a sidebar called My Places. You can create folders in the My Places area and all placemarks and tracks will show up there. I find the easiest way to export placemarks (waypoints) to my GPS is to first arrange them in a single folder which is pretty easy as you can drag and drop placemarks within the Places sidebar. Then right click (control click in Mac OS land) on the folder name and select ‘copy’. Now open Notepad (in Windows) or TextEdit (in Mac OS) and select paste. This will paste the information in kml format. Now save the text file, close it and replace the file extension (.txt) with .kml. In TextEdit on Mac OS you may have to take the additional step of going to the Format menu and selecting ‘Make Plain Text’ which will save the file as text rather than .rtf, then close and replace the file extension with .kml. If you use Garmin Basecamp as I do, then this file is now directly importable into Basecamp and from there can be transferred into your GPS. If you use software or a GPS that will not accept a kml file, use the free program GPSBabelFE (GPSBabel.org) to convert from kml to almost any other geo-referenced file format. GPSBabel is really an excellent tool for that, and I would recommend you support them with a donation if you find it useful. Remember that waypoint names will be limited by the device with the most restrictions. In my case that is my Garmin 276c which has an 8 character limit. Any waypoint names longer than this will be truncated on import, so keep that in mind. Most navigation software for mobile devises does not have these limitations and most will read kml files.

Making slides for presentations can give a sense of perspective. Here our walking safari paused 30 yards from a lioness.

For importing information into Google Earth, there are two options. If you already have a kml file or a gpx file, then just open that file in Google Earth and you are set. Exporting from Garmin Basecamp will give you the option of kml or gpx along with a couple of other file formats. You also have the option to run whatever file format you have through GPSBabel to turn it into a kml. The second option for importing is to use the GPS tool in the Google Earth Tools menu which can import directly from a GPS device, provided it is a Garmin or Magellan product, but it also gives you the option to import from a file.

It is very important to remember that Google Earth uses WGS 84 datum, so make sure your data is in that format before import, as Google Earth does not have conversion capabilities.

With your data in Google Earth, you can use the check boxes in the Places pane to choose to display or not display what you like. Right clicking and selecting Get Info will bring up a window that allows re-naming, adding descriptions, changing colors and icon and other operations. For track logs there is a measurements tab that gives the length of the track. You can also use the ruler tool in Google Earth to measure the distance between two points or along a path.

We are constantly told that nothing is free, and in the strict economic sense that may be true, but for what it is worth, GPS and Google Earth are two tools that are practically free and should be cherished. Scorn any person who tells you we don’t need satellites because their phone ‘has GPS’.