Many active people now use a watch or other tracking device to monitor their activities. As well as recording effort and time, these can also monitor position, and Strava and MapMyRun are examples of web sites where your routes can be uploaded against a map of the vicinity.

For orienteering, your exact route can help you improve your technique, make fewer mistakes … but you really have to upload your track against the actual orienteering map rather than a more general map of the area.

The orienteer’s tool for this is called Routegadget. If your monitor can produce a GPX or TCX file, it is easy to upload it onto the GMOA Routegadget site.  We haven’t yet completely populated this site with all our parks – if your park is missing, tell us and we’ll get it added.

For each park, there are usually two Events set up, one for people who choose to go round one of the Suggested Courses, and one for people who use the map in some other way (the all controls “event”).

For a Suggested Course:

  1. Click on the Event … this will give you a page with courses listed in the top left, and a blank map on the right.
  2. Click on the “Draw” tab in the top left.
  3. Select your course, and the map will show the controls and their order.
  4. Enter a name for yourself, and say how many minutes and seconds you took.
  5. Type in some (optional) comments, (eg. couldn’t find post X), and you’re ready for the upload.
  6. Browse to your GPX (or TCX) file, and upload it. Your track will now be overlaid on the map.
  7. Now have a careful look around your route and make sure your track matches the map reasonably well at a few well-known places (such as the controls). There are ways of tweaking it if you need to – by creating and moving handles – but you shouldn’t need to do anything much.
  8. Click Save GPS route, and you’re done.
  9. Click on the Results tab, select your course, and you’ll see your handiwork.

For All Controls, there’s only one “course” to pick, and everything else is the same. You might want to use the Comments bit to say what you were doing – getting them all, doing what you could in 45 minutes, or whatever.

Here’s a little video of getting a GPX file out of Garmin Connect and loading it into RouteGadget for Burrs Country Park all-controls.