# GPSBabel

Driver short name

GPSBabel

Build dependencies

(read support needs GPX driver and libexpat)

The GPSBabel driver for now that relies on the GPSBabel utility to access various GPS file formats.

The GPSBabel executable must be accessible through the PATH.

## Driver capabilities

Supports Create()

This driver supports the `GDALDriver::Create()` operation

Supports Georeferencing

This driver supports georeferencing

## Read support

The driver needs the GPX driver to be fully configured with read support (through Expat library) to be able to parse the output of GPSBabel, as GPX is used as the intermediate pivot format.

The returned layers can be waypoints, routes, route_points, tracks, track_points depending on the input data.

The syntax to specify an input datasource is : GPSBabel:gpsbabel_file_format[,gpsbabel_format_option]:[features=[waypoints,][tracks,][routes]:]filename* where :

- gpsbabel_file_format is one of the file formats handled by GPSBabel.

- gpsbabel_format_option is any option handled by the specified GPSBabel format (refer to the documentation of each GPSBabel format)

- features= can be used to modify the type of features that GPSBabel will import. waypoints matches the -w option of gpsbabel commandline, tracks matches -t and routes matches -r. This option can be used to require full data import from GPS receivers that are slow and for which GPSBabel would only fetch waypoints by default. See the documentation on Route and Track modes for more details.

- filename can be an actual on-disk file, a file handled through the GDAL virtual file API, or a special device handled by GPSBabel such as “usb:”, “/dev/ttyS0”, “COM1:”, etc.. What is actually supported depends on the used GPSBabel format.

Alternatively, for a few selected GPSBabel formats, just specifying the filename might be sufficient. The list includes for now :

- garmin_txt

- gdb

- magellan

- mapsend

- mapsource

- nmea

- osm

- ozi

- igc

The USE_TEMPFILE=YES configuration option can be used to create an on-disk temporary GPX file instead of a in-memory one, when reading big amount of data.

## Write support

The driver relies on the GPX driver to create an intermediate file that will be finally translated by GPSBabel to the desired GPSBabel format. (The GPX driver does not need to be configured for read support for GPSBabel write support.).

The support geometries, options and other creation issues are the ones of the GPX driver. Please refer to its documentation for more details.

The syntax to specify an output datasource is : GPSBabel:gpsbabel_file_format[,gpsbabel_format_option]:filename* where :

- gpsbabel_file_format is one of the file formats handled by GPSBabel.

- gpsbabel_format_option is any option handled by the specified GPSBabel format (refer to the documentation of each GPSBabel format)

Alternatively, you can just pass a filename as output datasource name and specify the dataset creation option GPSBABEL_DRIVER=gpsbabel_file_format[,gpsbabel_format_option]*

The USE_TEMPFILE=YES configuration option can be used to create an on-disk temporary GPX file instead of a in-memory one, when writing big amount of data.

### Examples

Reading the waypoints from a Garmin USB receiver :

    ogrinfo -ro -al GPSBabel:garmin:usb:

Converting a shapefile to Magellan Mapsend format :

    ogr2ogr -f GPSBabel GPSBabel:mapsend:out.mapsend in.shp

### See Also

- GPSBabel Home Page

- GPSBabel file formats

- GPX driver page