<para>
  The gopal format is a track format written by the
 <ulink url="http://www.mediongopal.de/">GoPal Navigation</ulink> program. 
</para>

<para>
  The format of the file itself is quite simple:</para>
    <para>
      <programlisting>
        Fileformat GoPal
        TICK;   TIME UTC; LONG;    LAT;       HEIGHT; SPEED km/h;  FIX; HDOP;     SAT
        3801444, 080558, 2.944362, 43.262117, 295.28, 0.12964, 2, 2.900000, 3
      </programlisting>

Filenames are automatically created by the device as follows:
      <programlisting>
        trackYYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.trk  </programlisting>
      and/or, depending on software version and settings:
      <programlisting>
		A_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.trk
              </programlisting>
	with HHMMSS local time (not UTC!)
      </para> 
      <para> 
The file format lacks the correct date value for each trackpoint, so it has to be computed starting from the
date given in the filename. To handle files without a parsable date in the
name, the command line option 'date' is provided.
</para>
<para>
Conversions from gopal into any other format are a bit lossy concerning the first field of each line wich looks like an useless time tick value
and is simply discarded while reading. If written, there will be a time_t value from the current (computed) timestamp.
</para>
<para>
Somehwere around Gopal 4.8 or 5.0, Electrobit added three more fields to the end of this format.  They are, in order, date (which eliminates most of the silliness above), an unknonw field, and a bearing.   GPSBabel now reads the date and ignores the other two.  We don't yet write these three fields for compatibility with earlier versions.
</para>
<para>

Filtering out invalid data points is handled by the options 'clean', 'minspeed' and 'maxspeed'.
For each datapoint the speed needed to come the from the last valid point is
calculated and compared with the limits.
Thus one cat easily discard unreliable points.

         </para>
