Saving Individual Tracks on TZT3

[moebur1]

Hello, I'm new to TZT3 and really excited about getting out and using my new TZT16Fs. As part of my installation, I am transferring tracks from my old NN3D MFD12 to the new TZTs. When I transferred several of the tracks as individual files, they all appear on the Chartplotter. I want to save and close individual tracks that are saved for specific trips. I spoke with customer service and they said you have to convert it to a route, which does work...a little bit. Here is the issue, when you are drift fishing over a wreck, you may make 10-12 passes and ideally you want to see each pass. When it is converted into a route, the machine does some "averaging" to make straight route lines. You lose the detail of the area you are actually trying to cover. While this may work in some applications, it is not ideal for those of us who drift fish a lot. On my old NN3D MFD12 you could save individual tracks, on the TZT3 you can't? Do I have this right? I'm hoping I'm mistaken b/c that is a huge drawback to the system. It isn't a hard fix with a software update but what you want to be able to do is select tracks you would like to have open at one time. You can then close them as you don't need them but sometimes you want to overlay a few trips. If this capability isn't available, I think this is something Furuno should take a hard look at. It has tremendous utility when fishing and traveling areas you don't frequent all the time.

As a last thought, you also want to be able to change the color of the tracks as you open them so you can keep one trip differentiated from another trip. Appreciate any feedback, maybe I missed the "Track List" but I can't find it and neither can customer support...which probably means it doesn't exist...which needs to be corrected.

 

[Taniwani]

What I found out regarding tracks is based on the TZT2 series, but I think there may not be much of a difference relative to the TZT3 series:

(1) Every individual device records its own track(s) and doesn't share them with another. On the positive side that means that you can configure 2 devices differently, one recording per time interval, the other by distance interval.

(2) A device starts a new track when when you set it from tracking off to track on state, it also does that when you power on a device that had tracking on when powered down. Inversely it ends a track when turning tracking off or when shutting down the unit.

(3) You cannot 'see' or manage the individual tracks on the device. It appears as all one big track.

(4) You can export all tracks together, but not individually, in which case all tracks are lumped into one file. Track start and end are given, but the tracks are unnamed.

(5) You can however export all tracks in one lump in GPX format and then use a utility like gpsBABEL to separate them into individual files, name them, give them a color you like and import them back individually at your discretion.

As you probably read in the manual, you can make the recorded color dependant of depth, speed, water temperature and a few more, and that way get a bit more information beyond position, date and time, into a track point. So it may be a 'waste' to give the color away for just distinguishing individual tracks.

If you really just want to keep the tracks apart by color, you can assign a fixed color, before turning on recording. When done with the track, turn recording off and assign a new color for the next track, before turning tracking in again.

I found that in narrow situations I want a dense track with not a big distance between the points, but when sailing on a straight course for a long time, I want more distance between the points so that I don't run out of storage too quick. So what I'm doing now is, to record at dense interval, but occasionally and before running out of space, export the waypoints and take out those where COG, (which you need to calculate form two consecutive positions), doesn't change. But I have not found a utility program that would do that and wrote my own little program for that. It also calculates the distance travelled as the odometer doesn't work very well on my TZT2s.