Managing personalised points of interest (POIs) on Garmin GPS systems (Bernard LEPIN and Marcel GOLL)
The difference between waypoints and POIs.
A waypoint is an addressable point (it has a name and location coordinates, and is represented by a symbol, a photo, etc.), part of an itinerary or route, an intermediate point or the destination. Way point, point on your way.
Waypoint is often used as a synonym for point of interest (as in CCWAY).
A point of interest is a piece of information that you add to your GPS map. It could be the location of a speed camera, a restaurant, a petrol station or a mountain pass. This point becomes a waypoint when you make it a destination or a stage.
On Garmin GPS units, the maximum number of waypoints varies from 100 to 5,000 depending on the model. With POIs, there seems to be no limit (I exceeded 30,000 points without any difficulty).
If you use waypoints, at some point you will overload the memory of your GPS, usually the day before you go on holiday (Murphy's Law).
In practice:
Using POIs gives you peace of mind. POI support varies from one model to another. POI support is similar on all hiking GPS (Oregon, Dakota, GPSMap...)
For EDGE family GPS cycles, we've gone from no support on the Edge 6XX and 7XX, to no official support but correct operation (without the search function) on the 800, on the 810 I have no experience but it should work, on the Touring and 1000 official support via the menu.
On a 800 screen it looks like this:
- Start by installing POI loader, Garmin's little free utility, from : http://www8.garminfrance.com/support/logiciel/logiciel.php?produit=poiloader
- Create a POI Cols folder which will receive your GPX files organised by country and accessibility. This will save you having to handle large files.
The GPX file is a points file containing the name, coordinates and comment (the comment can be an ISO code).
MapSource and BaseCamp will be very useful.
For a given country you will have a set of :
- Specs EN Road.gpx
- Specs EN Runway.gpx
- Specs EN Chemin.gpx
- Specs EN Single.gpx
- Specs EN Pedestrian.gpx
Etc....
The word specs is not compulsory, but its presence enables an alert to be triggered. For the passes, it will be a distance that you choose for each of the files. For example, I use 400m or 1000m depending on the category of pass.
The warning distance can be set in two ways:
- You use the proximity field in your waypoint list.
- You specify this in POILOADER
Below is an example for one point, but you can do the same for an entire selection.
It may be useful to associate a different symbol with each category.
The maximum size of the symbol will be 24×24 dots with a colour depth of 8.
RGB colour 255,0,255 (magenta is transparent on the GPS)
Loading POIs
The specsXXX. Gps files are placed in a folder, for example: POI cols/Italie/
If you use symbols, the symbol file type will be .bmp and the name will be identical to the file name.
Example:
- SpecsIT2R.gpx
- SpecsIT2R.bmp
For Italian road passes at 2000m
And so on.
Then you play with POI loader. Don't hesitate to use the software's help section, which unfortunately is more oriented towards radars than passes. The screenshots are from a MAC, the screens are different on a PC.
Indicate the source folder containing your .gpx and .bmp files.
You then choose where you want to place the peas: computer or GPS.
I suggest we start with the computer.
Choose the name of the POI file (here Italy)
You will choose a "Manual" mode installation. In Manual mode, you can change or delete the warning distance.
Then, for each file, you will have to choose the warning distance. 400m in the example.
After reading your files, Garmin congratulates you:
All you have to do is retrieve your POIs file, in this case Europe.gpi, and copy it to the
Your GPS:/Garmin/Poi/
You still have to check your work:
Start your GPS and, depending on the model, look for your POIs (POI loader creates a database for each folder, in the example it will be an Italy data base).
On a recent EDge it will be :
Where to go? > Search tool > Supplements > POI personnal (garmin forgets some translations)
Your passes are displayed according to their distance from you, with the nearest first.
After selecting your destination, the result is :
If you press "Go" your POI becomes a waypoint.
On the right you can see 05 Col vieux... this is a transparent map, a method that displays all the passes but does not allow you to search for them.
GPS... that could be another subject.