Most GIS packages have utilities or plugins to facilitate the direct download of GPS points from the GPS?receiver into the GIS program, and vice versa. This allows you to upload routes or coordinate pairs from a GIS layer to the GPS receiver, so you can use the GPS in the field to navigate to particular locations. If you are interested QGIS-GPS receiver interaction, we hope to have a resource available on this topic...stay tuned.

Also, QGIS can import GPS files already in the computer in a number of GPS formats. To translate among formats, it uses the capabilities of the open source program GPSbabel http://www.gpsbabel.org/ that should also be installed in the computer. In addition, QGIS has a plugin that will read files in the gpx format, an open-standards GPS data format.

For the purpose of this class/lab, we are presenting a generic way of creating a GIS layer from a text file with coordinate pairs. (But for your future projects, and especially if you have many GPS locations, it is advisable to download the GPS files from the receiver directly into QGIS).