File Conversion .gdb to .dxf or .dwg?

[RednekF350]

Guy, Boyd or others may be able to help me with this I hope.

I have a track stored in my Garmin 60CSX that I need to plot in AutoCAD for a project in work.
The track displays in Garmin's Mapsource and I have an option to "save as" a .gdb (Garmin's file type?) or .dxf file type.
dxf is compatible with AutoCad and I have tried reopening in Autocad with no luck.

I called Garmin tech support today and talked to two very pleasant and helpful English speaking Americans. What a treat.
They recomended gps babel, a free program that does all types of file conversions.
Unfortunately I can't seem to find dxf or dwg formats.

Does anyone know of a program that can perform this task?

I am a dunce with Autocad and know just enough to be dangerous. I am hoping that my assistant can take this a little further tomorrow but I would like to keep digging.
Thanks for any help you can lend.
Scott

 

[Teegate]

Guy, Boyd or others may be able to help me with this I hope.

I have a track stored in my Garmin 60CSX that I need to plot in AutoCAD for a project in work.
The track displays in Garmin's Mapsource and I have an option to "save as" a .gdb (Garmin's file type?) or .dxf file type.
dxf is compatible with AutoCad and I have tried reopening in Autocad with no luck.

I called Garmin tech support today and talked to two very pleasant and helpful English speaking Americans. What a treat.
They recomended gps babel, a free program that does all types of file conversions.
Unfortunately I can't seem to find dxf or dwg formats.

Does anyone know of a program that can perform this task?

I am a dunce with Autocad and know just enough to be dangerous. I am hoping that my assistant can take this a little further tomorrow but I would like to keep digging.
Thanks for any help you can lend.
Scott

GPSBabel is a great program, but unfortunately the newest Mac one does not work well for me. I believe I have AutoCad that I acquired from work in my Windows side and will check to see what I can do for you. I just check my older version of GPSBabel and it does not convert .dxf files.

I do have a Mac Geo program here that converts dxf files, but I don’t believe it will do what we want. I will get back to you.

Guy

 

[Teegate]

Scott,

I don't have Autocad in my computer, but I have Solidworks and a Mac EZ Mill program that both accept dxf files. So I went into Mapsource and saved one of my tracks to dxf and I could not get the file to open properly. I even tried gdb but I doubt that would work anyway because that is a Garmin proprietary file.

I honestly don't think a GPS track file will open properly in Autocad. I may be wrong. We use Autocad at work for our machining work, and I don't see it working with tracks.

Guy

 

[Ben Ruset]

Could you load the tracks in USAPhotoMaps and then export them to Excel? Would Autocad take the tracks from an Excel file?

 

[RednekF350]

Could you load the tracks in USAPhotoMaps and then export them to Excel? Would Autocad take the tracks from an Excel file?

I will try dumping it to USA.
I will ask this morning about the Excel possibility.

 

[RednekF350]

Eureka!!
I saved the track in Mapsource as a .gpx
I then opened USA Photomaps and imported gpx track files.
In the gps toolbar in USA I displayed the track on the map.
I then saved it as a screen jpeg.
The jpeg image is workable with Autocad according to my draftsman and it is brought in as an external reference.

This will be acceptable for the level of accuracy that I need for the project.
The track is a abandoned walking path in the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge that would have taken at least 8 hours to field survey by conventional methods.
I walked it with my handheld in about 14 minutes and I stored some of our known traverse points within the track
It looks pretty damn good on the aerial and it will be added to my survey with a note about the methodology used to map it.
We may still have to survey it a later date for re-construction but the initial mapping is all we need for now.

I am going to continue to look for a program that can convert directly to a dxf or dwg format.
Thanks for the help.

 

[RednekF350]

Eureka II.
Just for the hell of it, I tried the "save as" option again in Garmin after I got done doing the above task and selected the dxf file type in the drop down box.
For some reason, it worked this time (opertator error the first time I am sure) and I was able to open the track in AutoCad.
Oddly, we brought in the screensave too and it looks better on an NJDEP digital orthophoto than the dxf plot.
Amazing technology we have at our disposal.

 

[Medford Piney]

You can convert a DXF file to DWG format by opening the file and saving it in DWG format. You can then work with the resulting drawing file as you would with any other drawing file.

But I'm abit late on this I see...

are you using the MrSids photos??? you should look into attaching them as data as appossed to xref'ing them in if they are large, then you can do the same with alot of other availible gis info out there and not burden the drawing file.. this is not an option with straight out of the box autocad, you will have to be using Autocad Map, LandDesktop or the evil Civil3d

 

[RednekF350]

You can convert a DXF file to DWG format by opening the file and saving it in DWG format. You can then work with the resulting drawing file as you would with any other drawing file.

But I'm abit late on this I see...

are you using the MrSids photos??? you should look into attaching them as data as appossed to xref'ing them in if they are large, then you can do the same with alot of other availible gis info out there and not burden the drawing file.. this is not an option with straight out of the box autocad, you will have to be using Autocad Map, LandDesktop or the evil Civil3d

We are using the evil Civil 3D however that was not the issue. I do not use cad atall but our draftsman don't seem to like Civil 3D.
I know you can flip dwg and dxf .
My issue was converting Garmin's .gdb to dxf in Mapsource.
Now I have to figure out why it worked today as opposed to yesterday.
As I said, I know just enough to be dangerous. I still do most of my boundary calcs using a DOS Cogo program and dump my results to a floppy as a dxf.
The draftsman takes that and imports it to Autocad.
Scott

 

[Medford Piney]

We are using the evil Civil 3D however that was not the issue. I do not use cad atall but our draftsman don't seem to like Civil 3D.
I know you can flip dwg and dxf .
My issue was converting Garmin's .gdb to dxf in Mapsource.
Now I have to figure out why it worked today as opposed to yesterday.
As I said, I know just enough to be dangerous. I still do most of my boundary calcs using a DOS Cogo program and dump my results to a floppy as a dxf.
The draftsman takes that and imports it to Autocad.
Scott

Civil3d... I am not a fan of it either.. I work in Civil3D companion 2008, which is the new name for Landdesktop which was land development desktop...

I have a megellen GPS so the garmin stuff is latin to me...

 

[RednekF350]

I have a megellen GPS so the garmin stuff is latin to me...

The GPS Babel site has a ton of interchangeable formats between Magellan, Garmin Raymarine and just about anyone else's map software. It does not however have the normal drawing file extensions.

 

[Medford Piney]

I have easygps on my computor which does some things also, it's freeware and have used gpsbabel too.. I pretty much download to Terrian Navagator software for personal use. never used the handheld for work.. Have an old Trimble with the big ball antenna for "close enough" work at the office

 

[RednekF350]

I am amazed at the accuracy of the Garmin 60CSX handheld.

On this particular project I tested it by letting it "burn" a position for 10 minutes on two of our traverse points. The points were about 400' apart.
I turned on the WAAS and placed the unit on top of the points. I marked each point after letting the unit sit for 10 minutes.

Back at the office I converted the lat/lon to NJ state plane coords and inversed the distance between the two and compared it to the actual distance from our traverse.
The distance was only 0.61' different than the field survey distance. I was expecting at least 2-3'.

Pretty impressive for $360.00 worth of hardware. I noticed the other day that the gpsstore.com, where I bought one for my son last year, just dropped their price to $329.99

 

[Teegate]

That feature is worth every dollar! I use that all the time.

Between my new 60CSX and a few Mac programs I now use, I can get even more accuracy looking for things. And even in thick cover. I am impressed.

Guy

 

[Enoch]

Pretty impressive for $360.00 worth of hardware. I noticed the other day that the gpsstore.com, where I bought one for my son last year, just dropped their price to $329.99

I bought a GPSMap 60CSX for $285.97 from Amazon last week. I bought it based on the good reviews everyone on here had given it. I got it with the Garmin Topo 2008 maps. So far, I'm very happy with it.