GPS Babel, Robert Lipe’s conversion utility, has recently been updated to version 1.3.0. This newest version, I am extremely happy to say, converts National Geographic TOPO (.tpo) files. Yes TOPO users, you can now extract track data, converting it to .gpx or the format of your choice. It will work with TOPO versions 2 and 3, but not 4.x.
For those of us with a mass (mess?) of data in TOPO, this is welcome news indeed. I tried it out this morning and it works flawlessly! Congratulations to Robert and the entire team of Babel-heads, especially Alex Mottram, who appears to be their NG TOPO expert. (CORRECTION: Apparently Curt Mills deserves the credit here.)
National Geographic TOPO (Amazon) is a wonderful product, and remains my favorite in terms of CD/DVD-based mapping software. As I noted in my book, GPS Mapping – Make Your Own Maps, the difficulty in exporting tracks is one of the few disadvantages of this program (and the only major one). Finally, we have an elegant solution that allows you to extract your data.
Related post: Extracting TOPO (.tpo) track files.
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About Rich Owings
I need converted tpofile(video file)
So is this a program for converting topo national geo to a map source so I “garmin” don’t have to buy another 24k map?
No, it’s just a tool to extract data (waypoints, etc.) you have created in NG TOPO.
I need to take KML files with track data and convert it to .tpo file format so I can import the KML tracks into TOPO! Anyone know of a tool that will do this?
You can convert KML to GPX via GPS babel, and then import the GPX track files into TOPO.
Hello! For those seeking for a free online tool to convert kml to gpx, here is an option http://kml2gpx.com/ . It works both ways and it’s simple to use.