Tuesday, June 26, 2007

How to Hold More Than 500 Caches in your GPS

My Garmin Venture Cx will only hold 500 waypoints. But this trip I'm taking, I had 2700 waypoints to load! What to do! Well, Garmin has a program called POI Loader. Basically it makes custom waypoints. These custom waypoints are saved on the MicroSD card, so you can have as many as the card will hold. It took a little looking, but I figured out how to do it. Here's what I found:


In GSAK

  1. Go to View - Add/Delete Columns
  2. Uncheck everything except Longitude and Latitude.
  3. Select TWO other data columns that you would like included on the GPS (I chose Waypoint Name and Container)
  4. Click OK
  5. Make sure "LOCK FIRST COLUMN" is unchecked (upper right above the first column)
  6. Rearrange the columns in the following order; LONGITUDE, LATTITUDE, Data 1 (I chose Waypoint Name), Data 2 (I chose Container).
  7. Save the View by going to View - Save Current View and choose a name
  8. Go to File - Export - CSV or Text
  9. For filename, browse to a place on your C: drive that you'd like to save your file to. When you name your file, be sure to add the extension (.csv)
  10. Make sure that USE DEFAULTS is checked.
  11. Click Generate

In POI Loader
  1. Make sure your GPS is on and hooked up to the computer.
  2. Launch POI Loader
  3. Scroll through the Find Device
  4. On the next screen, you can Load New POIs on your Device or Remove Previous POIs. Delete any custom POI's if needed.
  5. Choose Load New POIs and click Next
  6. Browse to the directory GSAK created your .csv file to.
  7. Make sure Express Mode is selected.
  8. Click Next and your Custom POI's will be loaded!

That's It! One more mystery solved!

1 comment:

kelley350x said...

Thanks for the help, i have been trying to find a way to do this for some time. 500 Caches is way to small if you travel a lot like i do. My home town only has about 8 caches and they all belong to me bu i work in a much larger area and there is more than 500 there..
Thanks again.
MIke "Kelley350x"