lonelocust

You're not the only one. I was raised here in the US and although all my life (except for one short time in the 70s) I've been taught the imperial system. I still prefer to mark physical distances using the metric system; however, I find it impossible to wrap my head around distance/time measurements. I think it is because actual measurements can be mentally visualized but speeds are slot more abstract. Very few people can accurately estimate speeds. (personally, I'm happy the British use imperial speeds otherwise I'd have no clue how fast a bowler Fredie Flintoff is. I have no idea how fast the Australians bowl.) To be on topic: I've tried and there's nothing on Garmin units that allows distance and speed to be different that I can find.

Yes, but which GPSr chipset does the Airbus A380 use? If it's going to crash, we can at least hope they've got a good fix on their location...

I've been playing with Bobcat since the day it was released and I'm not finding it a particularly helpful program... starting with that MapConversion process. I am using Parallels, and on my first pass, it filled up my drive. I had what should have been plenty of space, but first it creates this .gmapi file, which it then zipped using .tgz. Temporarily nearly trebling the amount of space used for the maps. Once it's moved over to the Mac side (In my case not necessary because of shared drives), MapInstaller/Bobcat couldn't read the .tgz file. I had to manually extract it before it would read it. (Talk about wasting a lot of time to accomplish nothing!) Now I do have three copies of the maps. Then in imports it into your ~\library, making a fourth copy! Yes, you can delete the extras, but talk about inefficient. One thing I noticed about some (all?) of the map products, the DVDs contain data in .CAB format, which is microsoft's format. It's possible that a licensing agreement may prevent using that format directly on non-Windows OSes. The whole MapSource installer system is a bit wacky anyway, it's possible garmin might be moving away from that to the when "all products will be Mac compatible by year end." Another complaint: Bobcat seems to turn my GPS off every time I try to transfer data to it. Click Send or Receive, GPS turns off instantly.

Thanks, that helps. Unfortunately, GSAK is a little impractical for me, but I that strategy makes good sense. I think I can whip together something that can re-encode the .GPX file using something along those lines.

So, I get that data in the .gpx from a pocket query from here, but it doesn't load into my Garmin GPS (Vista HCx) - is that because the Garmin doesn't understand it, or do I need a certain program to load the data?

Now that I've been suitably embarrassed, I'm going to say that seems like a poor design choice on Garmin's part. Why on Earth would someone want to go into the individual maps first? (Assuming that they have multiple map products, which, admittedly, most people don't.) Surely it's more logically organized to start with the all on/all off for a particular mapset and then, if you want to fine tune that, step down an extra level in the menu to the individual sections? Even if all you do is work at the single map level, it would help narrow down which maps you're working with. Well, now all I need to know is what double-menu buried option tells me how many waypoints I've used/have remaining and I'll be all set. Pity the manual doesn't seem to cover anything useful.

Ouch! Yes, I misread that completely! Thanks! I might get to those geocaches before sundown from now on.

I do the same on my Vista HCx, and the technique is the same, but, I don't know if this is unavoidable or not, my City Navigator maps are at the bottom of the map list, and with 100 or so topo quads but only 4 CN zones for Arizona, I spend a long, long time scrolling through the maps to turn of the CN map when I get to my destination. (And just as long to turn it back on.) Does anybody know of a way to move the CN maps to the top of the list?