The primary GPS terms(1)

The following GPS terms you will encounter when you practice with your GPS receiver. You need a good knowledge of these GPS terms, if you want to follow the GPS Exercises on these pages: GPS Exercises.

TRACK: This indicates the direction in which you move. Sometimes this is called HEADING. For navigation on land this is OK, but a boat or a plane can travel in another direction, than the direction in which it is headed, due to wind or current.

TRACKLOG: This is the electronic equivalent of the famous bread crumb trail. If you turned (automatic) tracklog on, your receiver will, at fixed intervals or at special occasions, save the position, together with the time, to its memory. This can be invaluable if at any moment during your trip you (have to) decide to go back exactly along the route that brought you to your actual position.

TRACBACK: Among the best known GPS terms, it is the navigation method that will bring you back to your point of departure along the same trail that you traveled to your actual position. In order to be able to use this method, you may need to copy the tracklog to one of the free track channels. (This is where you need your manual for). Often a saved track can only contain 250 points, but be assured that your GPS receiver will do a wonderful job in choosing the points which best represent your traveled track.

WAYPOINT: Probably one of the most used general GPS terms. A waypoint is nothing more or less than a saved set of co-ordinates. It does not have to represent a physical point on land. Even at sea or in the air, one can mark a waypoint. Once saved in your GPS receiver, you can turn back to exactly that set of co-ordinates. You can give waypoints meaningful names. They can be created ‘on the fly’, which means that you can register them at 130 km/h on the road or even at 800 km/h in a plane. Your GPS will attribute it a number, which you can change to any name you want, once you have the time. You can also manually enter a set of co-ordinates, that you found on a map. This way you can plan ahead a trip or a walk with as much detail as you like.

Waypoints are very powerful navigation aids and for really critical operations it should be considered to not only store their co-ordinates in your GPS receiver, but also in your paper notebook. After all a highly sophisticated device as a GPS receiver could stop functioning correctly for a lot of reasons.

ROUTE: A route is a series of two or more waypoints. To create a route, you have to tell your GPS to reserve some place in its memory for a new route and then you indicate which waypoints will form the route. You enter them in the order in which you want to travel them, but you can easily navigate them in reverse order. You can add waypoints and delete others, but once saved, the order in which your GPS will guide you along the waypoints is fixed.

This is a great way to plan ahead a walk. You can even create waypoints and routes on your desktop PC and transfer them to your GPS receiver. All you need for this is a cable which links your GPS to a RS232-port(COM) on your computer and a piece of software, that enables you to mark points on a map at your screen. We will treat this in more detail elsewhere on the site. You will see that this is absolutely not rocket-science.