Re: Direct way-point write to Garmin SD card?

Alan, I e-mailed you directly but this seems to be the situation:
I bought 4 x512MB SD cards at $8 US and will upload 20 routes, 1 at a
time via com2 serial port to the 540 then transfer those routes to one
of the 4 SD cards and repeat this procedure until I have 80 routes
stored on SD cards which I can keep on the boat.
The alternative was improve the resolution of Mapsource Trip &
Waypoint Manager by buying a CD and paying some $116 per region x 2
regions to unlock then re plotting the 80 routes and writing them 20
at a time to the SD cards. Using the 540 as the trans coder is cheaper
and quicker.
Once I am set up it only takes ~1 min/route to select a route and
upload it to the 540 and ~2 min to transfer the 20 routes to the SD
card or 88 min total.
Thank you for making GPSU available, perhaps if I can figure a way to
capture the com port stream to a file I will see if I can use it to
trans code the data.
Incidentally I noticed a strange sequence of events when I first
played with the 540 . I was in the SF Bay area and the GPS acquired my
position in Mountain View then when I pressed the Home button I got a
screen offering "Screen Shot, OK?" so I pressed select and the
navigation map re-appeared with my boat icon in MV. I then drove to
Port Townsend WA for the summer and transferred "User Data" to a SD
card, examined rhe card contents on my pc and lo and behold there was
a .jpeg of the screen shot from MV. I have been unable to repeat this
since and raised the topic with Garmin 'phone support but the tech'
thought it might be a software bug. Perhaps it's some sought of an
"Easter Egg" that was popular among programmers in the '80's.
Regards, Dick



Alan Murphy wrote:
On Mon, 26 May 2008 22:10:24 -0700 (PDT), Dick <rqlhgl@xxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Using Garmin/Garmin protocol I can transfer up to routes data from pc
nav program to 540 plotter via serial port. Then in a second step
transfer this "User data " to a removable SD Flash card.
Is there a way to directly write my pc data to the SD card? I can of
course use Mapsource to do exactly this but their detail is much
poorer than the appropriate BSB/KAP raster chart.

You can try using "GPS Utility" - see www.gpsu.co.uk which will accept
waypoint/route/track data in various formats and then write this to a
Garmin SD Flash card. If you have any problems or questions on this
then email me direct.

Alan Murphy (author GPSU).
.

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