The story of GPSDump

Nearly thirty years of one Norwegian pilot writing the software the rest of us fly with — told, as far as possible, in his own account.

Before the tracklog: proving it with a camera

In May 1997, at a Norwegian Cup competition in Ørsta, Stein Sørensen took a photograph from the air. Not for the view — it was evidence. To have a turnpoint counted you flew to it, pointed a camera down at it, and hoped the picture came out. That was how a cross-country flight was documented.

Handheld GPS was arriving just then, and with it a much better idea: let the instrument record where you had actually been. In Norway, Stein Tore Erdals's Loggboka (later Flightlog) was starting to collect flights online. At Ørsta again, in May 1998, Stein Sørensen and Stein Tore talked over what such a logbook would need.

Around that time Stein bought a Garmin 12 — he still has it. The problem was immediately obvious: the tracklog was in the GPS, and there was no civilised way to get it out, into a file, and up to a server. So he wrote one, in C, for Windows. That was GpsDump.

His own first flight with a tracklog uploaded to Loggboka is dated August 2000.

The Windows years: one instrument at a time

What followed was a quarter of a century of the same pattern. A pilot would turn up with a new instrument, or a manufacturer would change a protocol, and GpsDump would grow a module for it. The version history on gpsdump.no reads as a roll call of everything free-flight pilots have strapped to their harnesses:

Around the device support, the rest of a pilot's workflow accumulated: waypoints and routes in every format anyone asked for (Ozi, SeeYou, CompeGPS, WinPilot, GPX, KML), IGC files with signatures and online validation, competition modes, airspace upload, Google Earth output, FAI triangle optimisation, and direct upload to Flightlog and XContest.

All of it free. All of it written by one person in his own time.

Everywhere else pilots wanted it

Pilots do not all use Windows, and GpsDump followed them. The first port away from the PC was a version for Windows Mobile — it never made it onto the website, and it had a short life, but it was the proof that the code could travel.

Exact dates for the ports have mostly been lost; the ones below are reconstructed from the modification dates of the files still sitting on the website.

The Kobo port deserves a note of its own: paraglider pilots had discovered that a cheap e-reader made a superb sunlight-readable flight display, so GpsDump learned to talk to one.

Android, and 1500 logged hours

The Android version launched in July 2012. It took a little over a year to build — Java was new territory — and Stein logged the hours as he went. They came to roughly 1500.

It became the version most pilots know: download the flight from your instrument to your phone at the landing field, and have it on XContest or Flightlog before you have packed your wing.

"I have always enjoyed programming, so porting GpsDump to other operating systems has never been a chore. Nor has it been when people asked for particular things."

— Stein Sørensen (translated from Norwegian)

The one that got away

There was one exception. When Apple stopped allowing 32-bit applications, keeping the existing Mac version alive would have meant learning Swift and rewriting it from scratch. That one did not happen — the only port, in nearly thirty years, that GpsDump did not make.

2026: the handover

Stein's last release, version 2.8.72, went out on 2 August 2024 — twenty-six years after the first one. In June 2026 he handed the source code over to Øystein Krag, and the work since has been modernisation rather than reinvention.

The C/C++ Windows program and the Java Android app are being rebuilt as a single Kotlin codebase: a shared core holding the device protocols, file formats and flight analysis, with the apps sitting on top of it. Release 3.0 for Android arrives in early September 2026, rewritten on that core and brought up to date with current Android. A new desktop version, replacing the original Windows program, follows later — and from then on a fix to a Flymaster protocol or an IGC writer lands on the phone and the desktop at once.

GPSDump stays what it has always been: free, non-profit, and driven by the flying community that uses it. Bug reports, protocol details from a new instrument, or a note that something no longer works with the latest firmware are what have kept it current for nearly thirty years.

The point of the exercise is not novelty. It is that a pilot landing in a field in 2036 should still be able to get their flight off their instrument — and that the next person to take the code on should find it in a state where they can. What 3.0 brings is in the changelog.

A note on the dates

Much of the early history was never written down. The dates here are pieced together from photographs, from an online logbook entry, from file timestamps, and from Stein's own recollection — and the ones before 2012 in particular are approximate. If you were there and remember it differently, or you still have an old GpsDump release or a scrap of correspondence that pins something down, we would like to hear from you.

← Back to GPSDump