jacksan

Just measured my 60CS and it draws roughly 1.5mA when off. This comes out to 'only' 2 months to run fully charged Eneloops/Hybrids to zero. I'm suprised it's this high...a RTC chip (real-time-clock) only needs .2mA to run. So, yes. Remove the batteries when not in use for a long time.

I'm trying some "RayoVac Hybrid" batteries which use similar technology as the Eneloops. They are pretty cheap at Wallyworld (be sure to get the $5 rebate on the charger combo). I have a pair on their first charge on the shelf with only a smallest drop in level after 4 weeks . My old Energizers began to die, having terrible shelf-life problems, after 9 months. Also, keeping batteries in the unit when it is off uses essentially no power.

"copy it and paste it into the topo section in question. Then I would have to reprocess the section with cGPSmapper" CenTexDodger... I'm always interested in tweaking the maps. Do you have some details on how you pasted into the topo file, and the steps to reprocess in cGPSMapper? stevesisti... you're holding out on me! ...neat utility for converting tracks! jj

Another option... You can fairly easily create custom topo maps of your favorite areas and upload them to your GPSr. 10-foot contour intervals with streams and lakes is no problem. USGS Seamless has .3 arc-second DEM data (better than 24K topo maps) and NHD has good water feature data. Not to much non-Forest Service trail data is available though. You can view your topos together (at the same time) with City Select, which I don't think Garmin TOPO will let you do. Tutorial is at: http://home.cinci.rr.com/creek/garmin.htm

Mapsource 6.9.0.2 beta Just bought City Select 7 so wanted to try uploading it together with some of my custom topos. I first tried the Test_Map sample in cGPSMapper and it shows up fine in Mapsource so I think I got the registry stuff correct. The problem is that cannot select the map (using the Map Tool) to upload it. Same thing again with one of my maps. This is my first attempt uploading with Mapsource so I may have something bass ackwards. Does anyone else have this working? jacksan

It showed up both on the 'display map list' and on the "download list". Zoom in on the south-west corner of Ohio to see it. I believe that if a data type shows up on the lists then it is available in at least a tiny portion of the region you are currently displaying. If you click (check mark) a data type on the display page then the map will automatically update and show/highlight the area that that data type is available for.

It was called "Apr 2004 .3M Color Orthoimagery". The DOQQ Color is not available in my area. If an overlay gives you nothing then it is not available. jacksan http://home.cinci.rr.com/creek/garmin.htm

The local county gov't forked out (my) big bucks for color .3M/p photos of the entire county last year. They now show up at seamless.usgs.gov for free. You can see the shingle pattern on my roof! Files are very huge. A 63MB 'section' is roughly 2x5 neighborhood blocks. If the data is available it might very well be on seamless. jacksan

See if you have a driver problem (an item with a yellow exclamation mark) in Windows Device Manager: under Contol Panel, System, Device Manager. If you do then right-click on it, go to Properties, click the driver tab then Update Driver. I had a similar problem and this worked.

An FYI for you custom mappers.... The USGS has a separate web site for high resolution hydrographic data (streams, lakes, etc) at nhd.usgs.gov Thanks, jmechalas!

I'm manually downloading 6.7 and yesterday it failed but today it's working.

I went to log a benchmark on GC (JZ0312, number 2 for me) and I don't see a way to upload a photo? How/where do you do this??

thanks for the catch on the .com thing You're right, using the Export-->Garmin Image option within GPSMapEdit works great. Note that when you first do it it sits there for a minute, thinking, before you see much anything happening. Be patient. Setting a map to transparent will let you see the basemap under your custom map. If you don't it will look like you overwrote your basemap (which you can't do). I haven't gone through the hoops to load them through MapSource because you can load multiple maps (including Garmin ones) through SendMap. The road and stream data from seamless isn't the best (low res, old) so I'm working on extracting data from 1:24K "Topo" maps (DLGs in SDTS format). Special kudos to stevesisti for helping work out the process.

Just an FYI for those thinking about making your own maps... I wanted a detailed topo for an area I like to hike in that isn't covered by the MapSource 24K maps. Turns out it isn't hard to make a nice topo, or a road map for that matter, from USGS data. No tracing involved. Downloaded data and software are all free. Also, the latest versions of the "contouring" software (DEM2TOPO) now also supports feet instead of just meters so you don't end up with odd contour intervals. I got the GPSr yesterday and have several custom maps already loaded! Here's the procedure I've come up with so far: http://home.cinci.rr.com/creek/garmin.htm

A tube a Lock-tite would make a nice travel bug, ehhh?

What are you using to convert the DEM data to contour lines? I've run across DEM2TOPO(free) and xyz2pmf($) and was wanderig what others have used.

GBC wrote: "You can replace the original .img WorldMap file with the one you edit " GBC, By worldmap do you mean basemap?? Where did you get the world/basemap to edit? Now the real question...can you somehow take the 76CS basemap and upload it to a 60CS ???