Converting Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS traces to GPX for OpenStreetMap

On November 17, 2009 · 1 Comments

forerunner305I have a Garmin Forerunner 305 that I bought to track all of my biking and running. It’s a nice unit (a little large) and had decent GPS, great heart rate functions, and great battery life. A little while after I bought the unit, I started doing some mapping for the OpenStreetMap.org project (blog at OpenGeoData.org). This unit turned out to be great for capturing traces for OpenStreetMap. Getting the GPS data off of the unit was challenging at first, but now that I’ve got the commands down, it’s pretty straightforward.


Required packages:

  • garmintools
  • gpsbabel

First, make a directory for your files to live:


mkdir Forerunner305
cd Forerunner305

Next, use the garmin_save_runs command to extract the files from the unit

sudo /usr/local/bin/garmin_save_runs

garmin_save_runs will store the files in a subdirectory like YYYY/MM. Assuming that you created a run on 08-Nov-2009, the files would be stored in 2009/11. These files are a special binary format, and must be converted to XML for processing by OpenStreetMap. The garmintools package comes with a garmin_gpx utility to convert the binary format to XML, but it stores point as trk elements instead of rte elements. gpxbabel is used to convert the trk elements to rte elements, and then delete the trk elements from the XML


cd 2009/11
garmin_gpx inputfile.gmn | gpsbabel -i gpx -o gpx -f - -x 'transform,trk=rte,del' -F outputfile.gpx

This command will yield a outputfile.gpx that suitable for uploading to OpenStreetMap, or using with OSM editor packages such as JOSM or Merkaartor


One Response to “Converting Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS traces to GPX for OpenStreetMap”

  1. Justin says:

    Just letting you know your guide worked for me. I used http://www.endomundo.com for mapping Thanks

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