[Dan Foster]

I'm getting LOTS of requests these days from people wanting to view their own data sets on a Garmin GPS. I've always stayed away from modifying the basemap on my various Garmins, so I don't have any first-hand recommendations for them of workflows or products they can use to do this. If any of you have done this yourselves, I'd like to hear your experiences. If you use ExpertGPS as one of the steps, please mention that, but if not, that's fine, too. If there's something ExpertGPS could do to improve this workflow, definitely mention that.

I realize there are tutorials for this sort of thing online, but I'm really interested to hear your first-hand experiences.

[Dan Anderson]

ExpertGPS is useful for cleaning up, modifying, and arranging/combining tracks as needed to create the trail and/or road network desired. Once there, the GPX file can be opened by other programs to get to the Garmin format file. These programs are mostly just going to help the user setup the point and polyline types. Some other parameters need to be setup too such as whether to generate a transparent map or not. Also the zoom level certain objects should be displayed needs to be specified. This is a confusing area for many people.

I wrote my own program to read a GPX file and create the .MP file for cGPSmapper. cGPSmapper is probably the primary program for generating the .IMG files for Garmin. I believe there are a couple of other programs that will actually create the .IMG files but I haven't used them (one I believe you have to pay for). There are other programs that create .IMG file but they are often just front ends to cGPSmapper.

My program takes my standard track and waypoint types in ExpertGPS/GPX and converts it to one of Garmin's types in the .MP file. ExpertGPS could help others by writing a .MP format file and optionally call cGPSmapper to compile it. There probably should be some user controlled mechanism to set Garmin polyline and point types such as a translation table from ExpertGPS types to Garmin types. Other parameters, such as the zoom level, need to be set too.

[J Scott]

I have been making my own base maps for a little over a year now. I use EGPS for about all my track editing then use Mapwel to turn it into an .img Garmin file. Mapwel has the features needed to build the map from scratch but I find EGPS to be much easier to use for what I need. Mapwel is a very easy program to use. In fact, I’ve never read the directions. I just experimented with the trusty ‘right click’ of the mouse and saw what happened. The only real editing I do with Mapwel is setting the tracks to the line type I want to have in the GPS; road, highway, trail, etc. It even lets you make custom line types. Most of my mapping is trail related and I can make trail types of different colors and line weights with Mapwel. Again though, I do 99% of my editing with EGPS. This would include naming, relocating, drawing and typing tracks. Mapwel can make transparent maps which means they show up over top of Garmin maps in the unit. That saves all the work of drawing roads and the like that Garmin already has. As I’ve said in these forums before; once you start making your own base maps you’ll never want to mess around resizing and loading track logs again. The biggest headache I have with EGPS is the limitations on track log names. There is a character limit and it always switches to all caps. These limits don’t seem to apply to the descriptions and labels but unfortunately those don’t transfer to Mapwel. That is kind of a pain when you have a road or trail with a longer name as you have to rename it in Mapwel. For me what that means is that I end up coming up with some sort of abbreviated name that others may not be able to figure out.
I have used cGPSmapper but it is a multi-step DOS program and very cumbersome to me. A friend of mine uses it extensively but he started using computers back in the DOS days so he’s familiar with it.
Having the ability to do everything with EGPS would be quite handy but I don’t know that you would need to re-invent the wheel. It would seem some sort of licensing agreement with Mapwel would let you integrate the features much faster and save a couple years’ worth of R&D. they are a small family company located in Slovak Republic (Europe) and I’m guessing that having the ability to team up with an established USA mapping program company would be quite attractive to them. They are at www.mapwel.biz and do the bulk of their support/announcements at http://tech.groups.y...m/group/mapwel/.

[pnadeau]

Transfering GIS data to a Garmin GPS is easy. I can create .img files with almost any Shapefile. Then I use Mapset tool kit to transfert this IMG directly into Mapsource.

[paul-herve]

Dan Foster, on Nov 14 2008, 05:17 PM, said:

I'm getting LOTS of requests these days from people wanting to view their own data sets on a Garmin GPS. I've always stayed away from modifying the basemap on my various Garmins, so I don't have any first-hand recommendations for them of workflows or products they can use to do this. If any of you have done this yourselves, I'd like to hear your experiences. If you use ExpertGPS as one of the steps, please mention that, but if not, that's fine, too. If there's something ExpertGPS could do to improve this workflow, definitely mention that.

I realize there are tutorials for this sort of thing online, but I'm really interested to hear your first-hand experiences.

Garmin introduced customs maps support for their new models, such as the oregon. It relies on the image overlay kmz format of google earth. Not routable but still you can get context on screen which is quite usefull already.

Would suggests that it would be usefull if expertgps could import/export maps using the image overlay kmz format of google earth.
It would allow to calibrate the map only once (either in google earth or expertgps) and to prepare a route in expertgps.
Thanks

[paul-herve]

paul-herve, on Jan 1 2010, 06:06 PM, said:

Garmin introduced customs maps support for their new models, such as the oregon. It relies on the image overlay kmz format of google earth. Not routable but still you can get context on screen which is quite usefull already.

Would suggests that it would be usefull if expertgps could import/export maps using the image overlay kmz format of google earth.
It would allow to calibrate the map only once (either in google earth or expertgps) and to prepare a route in expertgps.
Thanks

Found elsewhere in the forum that export part is alredy supported.
Thanks