Usually you will save a protocol of your trip when you are out with your GPS and also store some “hot spots” as waypoints. The protocol of your path is called Tracklog and it represents are normal track with all points where you have been. The trackpoints are not named but onlx numbered in a consecutive order. In most cases they will include information about actual altitude, speed and course and they will contain a time stamp. However, please note that this is not always the case: Some GPS units distinguish between Active Logs and Saved Logs and when copying an active log to a saved log in the GPS unit some information might be lost like time stamp, speed or course in order to save storage capacity. GPS-units for sport activities may also record data on heart rate or cadence.

In any case, these tracklogs can lateron be downloaded and stored in QV for visualisation or analysis.

To download a tracklog from your GPS please proceed as follows:

• Connect your GPS with the serial or USB cable with your PC and switch it on. You have to configure the interface to your GPS unit once in order to enable data communication. Most GPS units will be identidied automatically when clicking the Send to GPS or Receive from GPS icons. For further advice please refer to the chapter Connecting your GPS to a PC.
• You have two options to download data from your GPS unit:

a) You click on the Receive from GPS icon in the X-Plorer.

b) You select New > Receive from GPS

In both cases, the GPS Download assistent will open and guide you through the required steps and settings:

• In the first window (above left) QV will list the detected GPS units and the corresponding Ports. If more than one GPS unit is connected, you can choose from various brands or ports, or trigger an automatic scan through the Find GPS button.  You can also simply tickmark one of the listed models and click Next. The second window of the assistent (above right) you can select which kind of data you are interested in. Choose at least one category, however you can also tickmark all categories which are active.

• In the third assistent window (above left) you can choose the destination where the data will be stored. In cases where several data categories are imported, QV will usually suggest to import all data to a new database. The default name will be derived from the date, e.g. New Database_YYYY-MM-DD where YYYY represents the year, MM the month and DD the day of the month. Continue with Next. Finally you can choose in the fourth assistant window (above right) what you want to see after the data import has finished. The options are Show data in map and/or Show data in X-Plorer. Then click Finish.

• All selected data will then be imported and you will see a progress bar (see below left). Please also note that, accoring to the amount of data stored in the GPS unit, this might take quite a while. When the data import is finished, you will also get a summarizing message (see below right):

After the download is completed, the corresponding tracktable will look similar to this example:

Thereafter you can visualize the tack on any installed map, analize it (see chapter Track analysis), export it to a file or upload it to another GPS unit.