sardog1 said:
FYI -- you'll need at least Google Earth Plus to lay down a GPS track. The free version won't do this
Actually, you don't ... it will.
If you buy the Plus version, you can import from the GPS directly into Google Earth; however, if you do it the way I did it, it costs nothing. GPS Babel+ is free software, it reads the GPS straight off USB and writes KML, then you just open that in Google Earth and voila!
I should note that with a Garmin GPS there are three ways to do this, and a major quirk. You can save the track each time you finish a hike and thus get that specific one imported, you can convert the Active Track Log, which will have multiple tracks in it and you just edit out the ones you don't want, or you can have the GPS in a mode where it writes .GPX files directly to the memory card, then you attach the GPS via USB like an external drive and just copy the files off, then directly open the GPX in Google Earth.
The quirk is that the GPX or Active Log files have timestamps in them for every track point. If in Google Earth's view preferences you have chosen for time to be displayed, then only one path at a time will be displayed, even if you've checkmarked to see several of them.
The imported files have both path and individual track points; I tend to turn off or delete the latter and only use the former for imagery.
