![](\"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/15-Mar-2008_dodge_park.jpg\")
<\/a>Google Earth Plot of my Bike Ride(Click for full res image…)<\/center><\/p>\n
That right there is a plot of the bike ride I went on yesterday<\/a>. Yes, it won’t make much sense for those of you who don’t know the northern Sterling Heights \/ Utica \/ Clinton Township area, but it’s a ~12 mile round trip.<\/p>\n If you’re wondering how this is made, I simply had my old Garmin eTrex Legend GPS mounted on the handlebar of my bike, logging the route as I rode. Then today I connected it to my Mac via a serial cable and USB adapter, fired up the Mac OS X version of GPSBabel+<\/a>, set the input to the USB serial port, type Garmin GPS, selected to transfer only Tracks, and set the output to ‘Google Earth (Keyhole) Markup Language’, or KML file. Then I just opened the file in Google Earth, edited it a bit, deleted the points and left only the track, and saved it off as a new KMZ. Here is a screenshot of GPSBabel+<\/a> set up the way I use it for transferring data from my GPS to a KML file.<\/p>\n Note that when using the GPSBabel+, if I select Waypoints, Tracks, and Routes I only get Waypoints. If I select just Tracks, I get the data used for this plot. If I select just Routes, GPSbabel (or the crappy USB adapter, or something) hangs, with a process I can’t kill, even with -9. (This is why I suspect it’s the crappy USB adapter or its driver.). Also note that GPSBabel+ is a OS X GUI for the gpsbabel command line utility.<\/p>\n If you’d like to poke with the data for the map, and open it in Google Earth (or whatever) yourself, grab 15-Mar-08_dodge_park.kmz<\/a>.<\/p>\n
![Here is a screenshot of GPSBabel+<\/a> set up the way I use it for transferring data from my GPS to a KML file.<\/p>\nNote that when using the GPSBabel+, if I select Waypoints, Tracks, and Routes I only get Waypoints. If I select just Tracks, I get the data used for this plot. If I select just Routes, GPSbabel (or the crappy USB adapter, or something) hangs, with a process I can’t kill, even with -9. (This is why I suspect it’s the crappy USB adapter or its driver.). Also note that GPSBabel+ is a OS X GUI for the gpsbabel command line utility.<\/p>\nIf you’d like to poke with the data for the map, and open it in Google Earth (or whatever) yourself, grab 15-Mar-08_dodge_park.kmz<\/a>.<\/p>\nThis link<\/a> opens the file in Google Maps for you, with street names and such.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,57,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling","category-mapping","category-moved-from-livejournal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9284"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24720,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9284\/revisions\/24720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/gpsbabel_osx_usb.png\"){kind=link}