Loading Waypoints and routes into your GPS

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Chip
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Loading Waypoints and routes into your instrument

Post by Chip »

OK web site is backup and we're better. The article below helps describe how you can upload waypoints and routes into Garmin GPS's on the cheap......

Thought I'd help a few of you with the care and feeding of waypoints and routes into your GPS.

I'll try to cover both GPS's and the 5030 (since so many people are getting them).

First we'll cover Garmin GPS's.
If you do not have a cable for your Garmin, then you might as well stop here. There's nothing you'll be able to do without one. Secondly, you'll need a PC with a com port (sorry Mac guys :( , not much out there for you), unless you have a new USB GPS. Since I don't have a lot of experience with the new USB GPS's, I cannot offer too much guidence. But I do know that most of the new USB Garmin's require a special USB driver that needs to be downloaded from Garmin. Without the driver you won't be able to communicate with the GPS.

If you cannot afford the money for CompeGPS (and it's worth every penny), you can use a free program called G7toWin. It works very well for being free. It doesn't have a nice presentation like CompeGPS but it gets the job done. It can use a variety of file formats (which is one of it's strengths). For this discussion we'll generally use Garmin MapSource format (gdb).
Download the program, there's no installation so all you need to do is uncompress the zip file and place the program wherever you want. Start the program and open the file that contains the waypoints.

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You may need to set the program properties, generally these settings work well on most PC's
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Now that you have the waypoint file open you're ready to upload you waypoints into your GPS. Make sure your GPS interface is set to Garmin prior to uploading. On the menu bar choose waypoints then upload waypoints to GPS
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"Wala", your waypoints should now be in your GPS.

You can use the same steps for the loading of routes as well. Just substitute route for waypoints.

One other program I find useful is a conversion program that converts waypoint and route information into other file formats. The program is called GPSBabel
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