Dull tecnical post - Getting Waypoint coordinates out of Google Earth and into a GPS

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. Busy back in Mongolia.

Here is a little something for all you frustrated GoogleEarth + GPS users out there working out how the heck to get GPS waypoints out of the thing…

If you splash the cash of 20USD you can upgrade to Google Earth plus and plug in your GPS, or more usefully open Garmin Mapsource *.mps files into the GE viewer.

“So what” I hear you cry – you still can’t mark up things of interest in GE and get coordinates back out of the darn thing. Maybe the Google Earth Pro at 400USD is the way to go…

I think not!

1 – make your new points in GE. Make sure they are highlighted in the places side-bar. Save them as a GE file *.kmz
2 – rename the kmz file extension to zip. A kmz file is actually only a zip wrapper for the juicy stuff inside
3 – unzip your file, inside will be a file named doc.kml (ok, so I got up till now off the web, but no one seemed to have written-up the following...)
4 – select the doc.kml file and use a right-click to open it using excel
5 – you will get a prompt in excel asking how to open the file, the default is “as a xml list”, go for it
6 – just click ok to the next prompt and bingo, a list of waypoint details.

If you are feeling ready for some pain you can format them into a PCX5 waypoint file format to be read directly by Mapsource or Garmin GPS units, details on the web, somewhere…

The easy way only applies if you have a decent GIS program such as Mapinfo or Arcinfo. Edit the excel file to get the data into Mapinfo as points, export the Mapinfo table as a mif and then use GarFile (shareware download) to get things into your GPS.

Of course the above is all of theoretical interest only - remember folks, the data provided by Google Earth is copyright and storing the actual coordinates of points selected from their data may cause an infringment of the software licence you agreed to for using Google Earth. Mind you, they rely partly on a huge user-community to provide a fair amount of the info anyway, seems unfair not to be able to get waypoints back...