Falk Navigator (.tour)
A .tour file is a route from Falk Navigator, the navigation software behind Falk's German sat-navs. It is a planned itinerary, saved in an INI-style text file.
At a glance
| Extension | .tour |
| Encoding | text |
| By | Falk — the navigation business that became Falk Marcopolo Interactive GmbH, later United Navigation GmbH, Germany |
| Current version | Discontinued vendor software |
History
Falk began in 1948 as Falk-Verlag, famous for its patented folding city maps. The publisher was sold first to Bertelsmann and then to Mairs Geographischer Verlag, and its mobile-navigation data business merged with Marco Polo New Media in 2003 to form Falk Marcopolo Interactive GmbH, trading as Falk Navigation from 2009. After acquiring the rights to the Becker navigation brand in 2010 the company was renamed United Navigation. Under the Becker and Falk brands it was for a time among the three largest sat-nav vendors, and the second-largest maker of outdoor navigation devices after Garmin.
Where it is used
The format belongs to Falk's own devices — the F-series and the M-series "Marco Polo Edition", the latter shipping Falk Navigator 7 — and to the desktop planning software that went with them. Files turn up in the archives of people who planned German road trips in the late 2000s.
Structure
A .tour file is plain text laid out like a Windows INI file: named sections with key–value lines, one group per waypoint, rather than a comma-separated table. That makes it unusually readable for a vendor route format, and it is why RouteConverter parses it with its INI-file machinery rather than a line-based reader.
How widespread
A discontinued German consumer format. Nothing on sale today reads it, so the traffic is one-way: recover an old planned tour and move it to GPX.
RouteConverter support
| Reads | Falk Navigator |
| Writes | Falk Navigator |