Rescuing data from OziExplorer
Should you ever find yourself needing to use data locked away in OziExplorer format: drop me a line I can convert them to shapefiles for you lickety split. However, if I’ve been smushed under a bus or some other unpleasant scenario here’s how you can help yourself:
Use the free GPS Visualizer online service.
What I particularly like about gps-viz, aside from being available without installing and instant viewing gratification, is that it shows the command line used to use as templates in your own scripts.
The following GPSBabel command was executed:
gpsbabel -w -r -t -i ozi -f “ozi_tracks_008.plt” -o gpx -F “converted_tracks.gpx”
Which is pretty good if GPX or KML is what you want. There’s some extra steps to get to shapefile for easy consumption in ArcMap though. For that we turn to the ogr2ogr command line tool:
ogr2ogr output_folder “ozi_tracks_008.plt”
