EasyGPS looked like an easy tool for storage and loading but it comes
up short (at least in the free version) for editing tracks.
One of the things that made me consider it was that it can be loaded
onto portable media and used without installing it on other computers.

USA Photomap (http://jdmcox.com/) can also be used the same way and
you can save the freely downloaded image maps onto the device so that
you can see where the points and tracks are in the real world.

The Garmin Mapsource program does a really good of those things (but
cannot be installed as portable software) plus it is quite good at
allowing you to edit the saved tracks and location plus creating your
own. It also has a cost rather than being free like the others.
Since I have it and really don't need the portability, it is the one I
use regularly.

I typically use a 3 second recording frequency but that only gives
about 8 hours of time in the track file.
I went with a constant time recording because my old B&W Vista had
frequent drop outs of the signal or shifts as different satelites were
picked up. The constant time allowed those to show up as very
unevenly spaced points.
3 seconds was chosen to collect a particular level of detail while
inline skating on bike trails. For walking, I would use a longer time
to adjust for the speed being 1/3 to 1/5 of my skating speed but might
not want to drop it as far as that if the trails had more tight turns.

With the more stable readings of the Vista HCx, I could go to
automatic but would want to do some experiments to find out what level
would be best for the tracks I want to record.
I have not looked at the tracks from the auto settings to see if it
adds points if the slope of the track changes but not anything else.
If it does, I may go to that mode instead of my consistant time.
The x units can also be set to save the track log to the memory card
with full detail and effectively unlimited size. That covers multiday
trips much better.

You just have to play with it a while and try things out to see what
works for your personal choices.

Bill Fuhrmann - geek

P.S.

I should have changed it to 1 second timing when we went snow tubing
so that I could find the peak speed better within the short time frame
of a run.

Here are some of the tracks that I have edited and loaded into Google Maps.
http://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=103950240027887520152



On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 7:35 AM, Dennis Jewitt wrote:
> Hello Bill,
> Thanks for the advice. The track log is much bigger than I had
hoped. I have made up a serial lead and installed MyGPS which works well . By
downloading the track memory and saving the track log as a .txt file and then
opening with notepad I can get an idea of the sampling frequency. I will carry
out a few evening walks after work this week and investigate the settings.
Maybe a good start would be to use the "Distance" rather than "Auto mode" and
set to record at 10m intervals, that should cope with 100 km which is enough
range for the Sottish winter walk. I can understand the "Distance" and "Time "
modes but am unclear about the "Auto" so will avoid it.
>
> The EasyGPS looks excellent for managing waypoints and storing tracks.
>
> Thanks for your help
>
> Dennis