Marine Glossary

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track

1. Track has several meanings in navigation, all of which are listed in Bowditch, but in modern times a primary use refers to the breadcrumb trail left by your vessel icon as it moves across the screen following your GPS input. Essentially all charting programs use this definition with such phrases or button titles as: turn on tracking, save the track, export the track, and so forth.

In most nav programs we can specify the detail we want to save with these tracks, which means what step size do we save: every minute, or every second, or it can be specified in terms of distance changed in position. Likewise we can specify how long a track we want to maintain, one hour, one day? A track limited to just a few minutes (6 is typical) is often called a "wake.".

When exporting or saving a route or pathway we are in fact saving these tracks between waypoints, but in this case it is all implied in the phrases "saving a route" or "exporting a route." The word track is not used in this context.
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2. Another common usage is reference to the line connecting two waypoints of a route. The line representing a leg of a route. In this usage we can refer to our "intended track," and when we slip off of that track we can display how far off of the track we are, which is called the cross-track error.