planewood

Nope, they don't have any street maps, other than what came with the unit. Just major roads, I think.

Using Mapsource, can I create a route on my PC, save it as a GDB file and then send it to someone to load to their Garmin Etrex Legend cx?? In other words, I want to show someone how to get to my house with a route that they can use to auto-navigate with. They do not have city select or city navigator.

I made mine out of an old discarded cigarette lighter plug. Soldered in a double wire and put red and black computer plugs on the ends that fit the 60cx jack pins. Works great. Takes 12V though. Anything under about 10V will not work. Not knowing what voltage was provided with the regular power adapter for the 60cx, I slowly increased the voltage with a variable DC power supply.

When I use a Gillson antenna with my 60cx I generally get 3 FEET (~1 meter, for you young squirts) accuracy. Course I only use mine for waypoint marking when the HDOP is the lowest for the day. Being 65 yrs old, I ain't going to tromp around through the boonies unless the sats are in their optimum position.

Have you loaded the Garmin USB drivers? Only those drivers will work. If you have loaded the Mapsource program that is on the CD that came with the 60csx then you should have the USB drivers loaded. If not, then load Mapsource and see if Mapsource can see the USB port.

Since these tones work with neither of these loaded, using just the basemap, they're obviously part of the unit's OS, not the loaded maps. Yep, no volume control. Since I loaded Software Version 3 and CN V8 at the same time I don't know why I'm getting louder tones. But now I can definitely hear them over all the car and traffic noise. Before, my wife would have to tell me when it beeped or buzzed. Now she's complaining that it's to loud! Hey, you know what! I have been running alkaline batteries since I loaded the new software. They have a higher voltage. Maybe that's the reason?

Is it that I have all the new downloads or that I now have Navigator Version 8 that makes it now give a very loud volume? So loud with it's autorouting chirps and whistles that the wife is threating to throw it out the window! When I was autorouting with the base map that came with it, and with the older software downloads, it could hardly be heard. Is there a volume control?

This sounds interesting to me. When I use Garmin's MapSource program to download waypoints or tracks from my 60cx to a gpx file, I think the date and time are also in the gpx file. Now, what FREE programs will let one open a JPG file and then plot those points, with date and time, onto the image file? I have several programs that wil plot the point locations, but they will not automatically plot the date and time. Sure would be nice if Google could add this feature. I do have several image editing programs that will let you cut-n-paste textural data to an image file, but I'd rather have date and time added with one click of the mouse button for all points. If I could do this, then I could easily check the points against the Trimble Planning Software charts to get an idea of the accuracy of the recorded points. Conversely, why couldn't the GPSr just capture an image of the Sattelite screen to the microsd card?? And give it the same name as the waypoint. Or, capture the data for the sattelite screen and let MapSource recreate the screen image.

I loaded all of OK, TX, NM, KS, MO, AR, & LA onto a 256meg card. (City Navigator, version 8) I left about 30 meg of space for storing other things. The rest of the country including Alaska and the two western provinces of Canada, less NY, PA and everything east of there went to a 1 gig card. Now I wish I could add some road segments that they missed around here.

How do you "hand edit" the KML files? I've tried converting them in GPSBable but I always get "Truncated Track" error message when I upload them to my Legend cx. Only a portion of the track shows up on the GPSr. Scott I cut-n-paste the trackpoints out of the KML file into a skeleton GPX file using a text editor (Kedit).

Sorry, meant to say LOWEST DOP, above. Or BEST DOP. Actually HDOP as I was not concerned with the vertical.

Can we assume that the same version of City navigator is loaded onto your GPSr as is loaded to your computer?

In the Houston area, the GE images agree very well with the Garmin City Navigator V8 maps. I have used Google Earth to create 'paths' and then hand edited the saved KML files to create GPX track files. Those can then be uploaded to my 60cx as Tracks. I can then use the Tracback feature to follow the track. Not exactly like autorouting, but still accomplishes the same goal. Huh, this sounds alot like what I want to do, I just don't want to do it by hand I'll look into this though. Thanks. GPSBable is supposed to be able to convert KML files to GPX track files.

In the Houston area, the GE images agree very well with the Garmin City Navigator V8 maps. I have used Google Earth to create 'paths' and then hand edited the saved KML files to create GPX track files. Those can then be uploaded to my 60cx as Tracks. I can then use the Tracback feature to follow the track. Not exactly like autorouting, but still accomplishes the same goal.

Went back to some of my property corners and took more readings earlier this week. Last time I mesured them was about 4 months ago. The 60cx matched all of the old coordinates to within 1 meter, and about half were within 2 feet. The time of the day that both sets were measured corresponded to highest DOP according to the Trimble Planning Software. I also used a Gillson antenna for both sets of measurements. One point was deep in the woods under heavy leaf cover. That point actually repeated exactly the lat/lon I had recorded previously. With the last set of measurements all bars were maxed out with D's showing except for the point in the woods. There about half the bars were at half height+, with D's showing on all. When I got home I plotted the positions using Google Earth. When I opend GE I discovered that a 3 or 4 sq mile area centered over my property now has a high resolition (high detail) image. I had overlayed an aerial photo over the area but now find the GE image to be even better. But, while the GE image appears to be dead on in the NS direction, it seems to be shifted about 10' west from what it should be. I have all the latest updates for the 60cx. At least I think I do - haven't checked for a couple of weeks. Oh yeah, D's were not showing the first time I recorded the above points. This tells me that it must have been using WAAS corrections eventhough it was not apparent.

I got the rest of the USA loaded to a 1 gig card except for NY, PA, and the states northeast of there. I did include the two western providences of Canada. Using the card slot on my computer it took about 30 minites to get it all copied. I left about 50 meg of free space on the card to allow for waypoints, tracks, and POI's. All the data appeared to be there after trying it in my GPSr.

Hi Planewood, I believe I found what you are looking for. I just downloaded an entire County (Natrona, in central Wyoming) worth of this info where I used to live and am familiar with. It is in GIS shapefile format and has everything you could possibly want, including the Lat/Lon NAD83 points for every 1/16 section (1/4 of a 1/4 section). Yes, a point at every corner of each 40 acre parcel. For my county there are 121,494 corners! Wyoming has 23 counties. Check out this link for the Land Survey Info System (LSIS). This data was compiled by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) cadastral survey program. If you have the ability to use a shapefile you are golden. If you have a specifc area you're interested in perhaps I could help create a more user friendly .gpx file for you? Good luck. Timpat - I checked out that web site. Interesting, but nothing available for NE Oklahoma. Took me a long time to figure out how to download stuff for one of the western states. Then it was just a bunch of 'gooble-gook' binary files! Are there any free programs around that will extract coords with descriptions from a shapefile? Also, in the zip file that you get from that site, which shape file do you know to use?

Anyone found an online source for lat/lons of section corners? Or even township corners?

you know, you can always go to USAPhotomaps and download as big of an aerial photo image as you want, then use GE to 'overlay' that image over the GE image. GE is working to define higher resolution coverage. Takes time and a lot of bucks for them to do so. In my neck of the woods (Houston) the coverage is excellent and with very good resolution. The images are also registered quite well with less than 3' accuracy being the norm. For the other places I just create a large JPG photo image file and do the overlay bit. I just wish that GE gave the ability to define several lat/lon points on the overlay images as a means to register the files. Instead of trying to move the image around to line up with their images.

Got parts of it loaded. Here's my experience. Loading to the 60cx via the USB Mass Storage port was going slow. During the process it got an I/O error and the loading terminated. I took the microSD card out and used the adapter and plugged it directly into the port on the computer. Went MUCH faster and no I/O error. I got all of TX, NM, OK, LA, AR, and the southern part of MO into 200meg of storage. When the data was being copied from the DVD, I was never asked where I wanted the data stored. I noticed later that it had been put into the Garmin directory on my C drive under the CNNA8 folder. 1.6 gig worth if IMG files. I tried autorouting on the 60cx afterwards and everything appears peachy keen. Routing to my sons house was made twice as long due to a 100' gap in the desired road. Have no idea why it thinks a gap is there.

I want a cell phone with digital camera, SIRf III GPS, and MP3 player. I also want it to be able to periodically dial up my ISP (automatically) and upload track points to my Internet web site.

60cx using Gillson antenna with latest WAAS satellites showing. EPE is 7' to 11" when out in the open under clear blue skys and DOPh is most favorable. Actual accuracy is 2' to 5' under same conditions. 11' to 15' EPE under worse conditions. If you don't know what DOP is then go to http://www.trimble.com/planningsoftware_ts.asp and get their Planning software (free).

Thanks guys, I appreciate the response.

Trimble, with the Trimble external antenna! Expect to pay $6K+.

A few questions: 1) Can I load map segments to several different microSD cards? 2) Can I load them with the microSD card plugged into a SD port? (I have an adapter) 3) Can I copy the DVD to harddisk first and load from there as opposed to using the DVD? 4) Can I expect Garmin to ever issue updates for particular map segments? 5) Will there be different entities I can load (or not load)? Maps, POI's, etc. 6) How do you select which map segments are to be loaded? By state, by outlined area? 7) Should I un-install the base map that came with the unit? How would one do that? I plan on putting everything west of the Mississippi river on one 1-gig card and then having several different 256-meg cards for everything east of the Mississippi (I have several of these smaller cards). I'm assuming I could simply switch cards as I passed into different geographical areas. Is this a valid assumption? I have the latest copy of the Mapsource program and all the latest updates to the GPSr.