Practice Planning with 2017 IBR Rally Book

Fun Bobby

Premier Member
IBR Finisher
#1
Hi All. I'm sorting through the 2017 IBR rally book and finding myself overwhelmed entering 325 bonus locations. I'm imaging myself in the hotel room after receiving the rally book at approximately 8:30 in the evening. At my BaseCamp data entry rate (symbol, point value, availability, page number), I expect it will take over four hours to enter the information before I even start to determine a route to ride. Thus, it will be well after midnight with an early showtime for odometer checks.

What techniques or methods do you all use to approach "on-the-clock" data entry for multi-day rally route planning?

Rob, 2013 K16GT
Navarre, FL
 

Fun Bobby

Premier Member
IBR Finisher
#3
Yes, an uploadable file with bonuses is provided for the different routing programs, but it doesn't contain bonus point values or coded bonus symbols. Other details such as bonus availability is contained in the rally book and bonus point values are in the Excel file. Thus, I have three programs open (BaseCamp to route, Adobe to reference rally book, and Excel for bonus point value), and I have to work between them (time consuming) in order to get the BaseCamp bonus identifier to a format I prefer - bonus code, point value, availability, and page in rally book.

Rob, 2013 K16GT
Navarre, FL
IBA 15661
 

Ira

Staff member
Premier Member
IBA Member
IBR Finisher
IBR Staff
#4
Just FYI, this year the riders were emailed the GPS files, but the rally book and points lists were given to them in hardcopy. So no pdf file for the rally book and no Excel file for the points.

Ira Agins
Iron Butt Association
 
#5
Just FYI, this year the riders were emailed the GPS files, but the rally book and points lists were given to them in hardcopy. So no pdf file for the rally book and no Excel file for the points.

Ira Agins
Iron Butt Association
The files with the rally book and bonus points are available on the website. Any chance they would consider making the gps file available now that the rally is over?
 

Fun Bobby

Premier Member
IBR Finisher
#6
What time were the riders released from the Marriott start point? I'm practicing route planning and don't remember reading a release time.

Rob
 
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cacomly

Premier Member
IBR Finisher
#9
Just FYI, this year the riders were emailed the GPS files, but the rally book and points lists were given to them in hardcopy. So no pdf file for the rally book and no Excel file for the points.

Ira Agins
Iron Butt Association
Actually we did get the points in CSV and TXT formats
 

ravenranger

22798 now 580
Premier Member
IBR Finisher
#11
Cutting and pasting is your friend.

We got coordinate files in a variety of formats: txt, csv, gpx, gdb, kml.

We also got the value list in both txt and csv format.

The first two legs, I opened the txt file and did a find/replace where I found spaces and replaced them with a single period. That gave me a list that was "code.points". I then opened the csv file in excel, renamed the checkpoint and finish with a z in front of the name and sorted alphabetically (this put the checkpoint and finish out of the middle of the list to the end of the list). In my text file, I added zcheckpoint and zfinish as the last two rows and the copied that and pasted it into the first column of my csv file. This renamed the all the location waypoints to include the point values.

It took me until the end of the second leg to figure that it would be helpful for routing on the fly to know if the points were daylight, anytime, special instructions, etc. and I came up with a "code" for that which was easily accommodated into my previous scheme. (CLICK HERE) for more on that, it's about halfway down in that post. Although, it wasn't really mission critical for me as many were daylight and I was mostly only riding in daylight anyway and I had a set list the first two legs that I pretty much kept to.

I also used a fantastic phone app called GPXViewer which made getting a quick overview of things much easier because I changed the "symbol" column from "blue flag" to "Number 1, Blue" for Air, "Number 2, Blue" for Land, etc. BaseCamp recognizes those symbols and GPXViewer recognizes them. The Zumo and Nuvi didn't.

I've attached a picture of what it looked like on my phone (this is from leg 3). I'd color coded the number categories based on value with blue being low, red being medium, and green being high. I did this manually by pasting in the point value column into the excel file and then doing an advanced sort by value and alphabetical. I then cut the points column (since I'd already combine the points into the name) and translated the csv file to a gpx file using GPSVisualizer online. Then, it's simply a matter of loading the POI's into the GPS's and transferring the gpx file into the phone (I used usb but one could also send themselves an email attachment and save it to the phone as well).
 

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cacomly

Premier Member
IBR Finisher
#12
Isn't that what I said? ". . .the riders were emailed the GPS files. . ."

Ira
You stated "this year the riders were emailed the GPS files, but the rally book and points lists were given to them in hardcopy. So no pdf file for the rally book and no Excel file for the points."

We did receive the points in CSV and TXT formats
 

Ira

Staff member
Premier Member
IBA Member
IBR Finisher
IBR Staff
#15
I'm afraid I don't have them. But I had posted the following some time ago:

I have posted the waypoint files for the 2013 IBR at

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hpfxn514qrybdzz/AABMlLgukbo8LhpD4zXy8gO5a?dl=0

If you hit the "Download" button and select "Direct Download", you will receive a zip file with all three format files - .gdb, .gpx, and.txt.

If you then go to the 2013 IBR page at

http://ironbutt.com/ibryear.cfm?y=2013

you can download the three bonus listings for that rally. Between the two sets of documentation, you could actually run the rally on paper for practice. And if you read Bob Higdon's daily reports, especially the one labeled "The Finish", you can compare what you came up with against what the riders ended up doing.

Ira
 

Ira

Staff member
Premier Member
IBA Member
IBR Finisher
IBR Staff
#18
I know this is an old thread, but, when I go to the http://ironbutt.com/ibryear.cfm?y=2013 I don't find the bonus files . Now I may be missing something, can someone confirm they are there or point me to the right place ? thanks Very much... Jim
We're in the process of switching ISPs and rebuilding the Web site. It will be back when we have completed the transition.

Ira Agins
Iron Butt Association