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gcfishguy

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Everything posted by gcfishguy

  1. Well, I thought it was in this thread that someone mentioned Locus Maps Pro...but maybe it was in a different thread. Anyway...I started playing with it a few days ago, my Oregon 450 is now in its original packaging, about to go on Kijiji for sale. I used the free version, used it a day, then THREW my money at the full Pro version. Everything the other apps didn't do right, this one does. Everything I wanted to do but the other apps didn't, this one does. Eats PQs for breakfast, I have 12000 caches, hundreds of waypoints, and hundreds of tracks adding up to thousands of KM....it slows down a little bit when I zoom out far enough that all that junk is being displayed (little slow on the re-draw..haha) but once you zoom into a level that you would actually use, it regains all its speed and works like a charm. Imports data slick, exports data slick.... Grabbed offline maps for my province and the two neighbouring province with the 'Locus Coins' so I have offline maps for 3 provinces. And they didn't require an afternoon of fiddling with little rectangles and file after file... 3 provinces, 3 maps, easy-peasy. For fun I opened Mapsource, selected about 150MB worth of topoCanada tiles, created a mapset, renamed it to whatever I pleased, and dropped the .img into the maps folder. Holy...it works! Sold, 5 times over...
  2. Well, as for carrying multiple devices, yes, I agree that no jack-of-all-trades gadget will do everything as well as the devices designed for that task, but it sure makes for less crap to drag along. I like to carry the GPS while I'm fly-fishing small rivers, streams, etc. I also like to have the phone to touch base with home. And the odd time I like to grab a pic with a trout before I release it. I got rid of my DSLRs because I got tired of dragging them around. So, while wading small brooks and bushwhacking all day, you want to travel as light as possible. Having the GPS/phone/camera combo is really attractive. I also sold my ATV and bought a small dual sport bike. I quickly found out that you really learn to bring as little as possible on a motorbike. Again, the phone/GPS/camera combo... I don't expect the phone to be a DSLR. But the reason I have had 5-6 DSLR's and keep getting out of them is because I can't drag them along fly-fishing, exploring trails on the bike, etc. And I don't need the image quality, I just occasionally want to snap a pic to document something, or to text a pic of a nice trout to a friend that decided to not come fishing and stay home and mow his lawn or something. Yes, each time I noticed the 'arrow indicating I'd driven by the cache' thing, I was in the car, idling along the little dirt road. The compass pointer acted as though the cache was around 10m off the side of the road beside me, but it was actually 10m off the side of the road, say, 50m DOWN the road ahead of me. As I drove past the place that the compass pointer was saying was GZ, the pointer swung to 9 o'clock, then to 8, then 7..with the same speed and acceleration as though GZ actually WAS there. I'm sure you've been going down a road watching for a cache and seen the pointer swing beside you, then start pointing back behind you...just like you overshot it... Well...that. But the distance to destination keeps counting down and is reading the correct values. Maybe it's the metal in the car.....I'll give it another try and pay more attention to the results. I mean really..I can see the cache on the map, the distance is reading correctly, so if I know that the pointer is going to be wonked under those conditions, I can use the other info to get pretty close to the cache. I'm just one of those people that wants stuff to work the way *I* want it to work. I also go through the house, correcting the time on any clocks that are off by more than around 30 seconds. Does it matter? ...only to me. And I noticed that CGeo has the option to tap the screen at any time/speed and select either GPS and Magnetic, or GPS only. Did I happen to think to do that while I was seeing the funky overshooting thing happening? No, I did not. Again, I was out with a new cacher and I was mainly letting her practice the navigating, helping her learn what to look for, etc etc...so when my redundant unit went screwy, I didn't dedicate a whole lot of time trying to figure it out. I just put it away and let her practice with her Oregon 700. (Which has now given me GPS-envy and has me wanting a newer unit...dammit) I had been out of caching for a while, but am getting back into it...I think maybe I just assumed that with the advances in smart phones lately, they would be able to step right into a dedicated GPSR's shoes. It's looking like they're still "a workable alternative if you don't have an actual GPS unit"...
  3. I use an Otterbox case (well, 2 of them...a Defender and a Commuter) No metal in either of them.. When it swings around and acts like I've driven past the cache, it's not bouncing around or being affected by interference...It's seeing GZ in completely the wrong place. This was on a one-lane road with no large sources of metal. After this would happen, I would stop the car around where the cache was, go-to a different one, then go-to this one again and the pointer would then point pretty much where the cache was. As I started in the original post, I tried calibrating the phone, and also verified in the screen where you see all the raw data from all the sensors, and I have a blue line with a 3...indicating all 3 Axis are calibrated properly. The series of caches we did were essentially just placed along the side of dirt road because there were no caches there already...film cans hanging in evergreens about 10m into the woods. So I'd walk across the road and check the pointer when I got to the ditch, 10m in, pointer pointing at about my 11 o'clock. Cache buddy beside me with her new 600, shows 10m in, pointer at about her 1 o'clock. My C:Geo was always pointing about 15' left of the cache. If I switched off magnetic, then walked away and walked back to the same spot, the pointer was then dead on. So, that tells me that the GPS portion is working top notch. But the magnetic compass is what's causing the issues with the pointer. Again...the issue with looking like I drove past the cache when it's still 50m ahead, only happens when magnetic is enabled. The pointer pointing at 11 o'clock when it should be pointing at 1 o'clock, only happens when magnetic is enabled. And yes, I do understand the circle of accuracy, etc etc, and how the GPS won't necessarily walk me right to the cache... I have almost 300 finds, and I get how the direction and distance work as you approach a cache. The issue is that when I have the magnetic compass enabled, the tool is just plain incorrect. As I approach the place I already know the cache is, I can tell the pointer is NOT pointing where it should be when the magnetic compass is enabled. Anyway...maybe it's an S5 thing. It's absolutely perfect if I just use the GPS portion, but I really want to be able to use the magnetic compass and not have to rely on movement to have an accurate pointer. Yeah, kinda spoiled as the the Oregon 450 and the 60CSX before that both had the electronic compass. Picky picky....I know. It just drives me nuts when something doesn't work right.
  4. I've had a BUNCH of Garmin GPSRs and not I'm looking hard at carrying one device rather than the nice camera, the dedicated GPS, the phone, etc etc.. Over the winter I've been working on getting a system for saving tracks from trail bike rides, etc etc. But, I just went out caching and hit a few snags. SO, the magnetic compass does not seem to play well with Android caching apps. I honestly don't remember what the official app does (which I bought and paid for) but it must have acted similar because I switched to C:Geo out in the field yesterday... I have gone into that secret area with all the sensors and data and my compass calibration is always the blue line with the 3, indicating "All systems go, Cap'n". I have waggled it around anyway, with no change. C:Geo : For example... I go down a dirt toad, the cache is 20' off the road in the woods, 100m away. I'll still be a long ways from the cache and the needle/dial has swung around as though I've already driven past the cache...but it's still 50m down the road. I tap the magnetic+GPS selection to switch it to GPS only and it immediately corrects and points exactly where GZ is. Turn the magnetic portion back on, it swings around behind me again. Yes, I could use it with the magnetic sensor disabled, but I really like it on the GPSr units I've had, and to not have to run back and forth to get it to update when you turn around, etc,....yeah...I want that. GCDroid: I open the compass screen, North is not North. It's around 10 degrees off, consistently. I compared it with my cheapie compasses and then dug out my Sylva Ranger. All the same, the compass is always around 9-10 degrees off. I'm at about 18 degrees west declination (already thought of that. I don't know if the C:Geo issues are related to the 9-10 degree thing I see in GCDroid; I recently got back into caching and spent the day yesterday using my phone as a test to see if I could use it and it only. So yesterday I was out all day with C:Geo and each time I used it, it did something wonky. I was with a fairly new cacher with a brand new Oregon 700 so she was getting used to that and the caches were a series of 25 along a dirt road, so they weren't hard to find and she did all the work as she needed to get some real-time caching experience (had done all the research, but got out there and had no idea what to look for so couldn't find anything...you know, you started there too)...so, having a flummoxed phone wasn't a deal-breaker. And I didn't want to use up data to download a new app. I tried GCDroid when I got home...I like it, but being 10 degrees off...gahh... Same boat? Suggestion?
  5. Okay...mystery of the vanishing tracks solved.... I copied a bunch of groups of tracks from basecamp and pasted them into Mapsource.....the 10 tracks for this trail system, the 15 for that trail system, etc... Then I saved them ALL as one GPX, opened that GPX in GPX2IMG, and started assigning each trail system a different colour, then let GPX2IMG create one big IMG. To be clear, I always enable the option in GPX2IMG to "Enable TYP files to create custom colour maps". That takes away the designations of Major Road, Trail, Boundry, etc, and gives you a lot of different colours to choose from, and each colour can be 2 pixels wide, or 4 pixels wide. This time, the only thing I did differently was to not really care what trail system got what colour...since I was just testing different stuff. I had always given the trail system around the cabin the colour blue. Why blue? Dunno...just because..... This time I gave it red. I checked after loading the IMG onto the 450, and yes!!! it's visible at all zoom levels. but wait.....there should be trails over there in that trail system...but there isn't. I zoom in to 200m over there, and lo and behold they pop up....and guess what colour I happened to have assigned them.....right...blue. So...it may happen with other colours, I'm not sure, but of the colours I use, blue is the only one that vanishes after zooming out past 200m. Son of a..... Why do tracks that are blue not display past 200m (all other things being dead-on equal)??? Beats the poop out of me..... So, there you go. Or there *I* go, since I'm likely the only numbskull that's ever wanted 600 different tracks in one transparent layer....but I figured I've typed this much, I might as well post my findings in case it can save someone some head scratching when they're poking around forums and trying to do a similar thing....
  6. Thanks for that grasscatcher..that makes a lot of sense. I may end up doing it that way but having dozens of tracks to enable on the unit is a pain. The 'show/hide on map' think still baffles me, why you can't flag them in basecamp to be shown by default or something. It's fine if you have one or two tracks for a day of hiking, but I could run on dozens of different tracks in a day..what a pain to have to go into each track and set it to show on the map. It's tough as well, to combine a trail network into fewer tracks because of loops, offshoots, etc. It would be nice if a new type of 'track' was created where it could just have branches sticking out, loops, etc....not having to being a continuous line with a start point at one end and an end point at the other. Okay, on to my next weird thing that's going on. For some reason, the 450 is displaying these transparent IMGs at different zoom levels...for no reason. I'll look at the map, and the network of tracks (as a transparent IMG) around the cabin will be visible, I zoom out a but, and other tracks from other layers start coming into view. For whatever reason, the IMG that contains the tracks around the cabin is visible zoomed way in, out to 200m, but at 300m and beyond, it's gone. But, other tracks from different IMGs are always visible.... I have tried disabling all maps (topocanada, city Nav 2014)and if doesn't make a difference. I went through my zoom levels and none of them effect the transparent layers. I'm not changing any setting in GPX2IMG between gpx exports, and I have tried only adding the IMG for the trails around the cabin, and no others...it still vanishes after the 200m mark. It's beyond me what makes it any different than any of the others. I even went through exporting the lists again (from Basecamp) one by one, and remaking each IMG one by one, and that one still behaves the same way. I know, some people are saying, "Why the heck does he want to do this and that and whatever...."...that's what some of us do. Some people plug their GPS into their computer and send one geocache to it, then go out and look for it...we all use them differently. Anyway...I upgraded to the 450 for several reasons; the ability to use several maps at once was one of them. I just want it to work. :-) Anyone have any ideas?
  7. Sadly, no.... The actual GPX files are not singled out on the GPS...it just displays a list of all the tracks in the gpx files.
  8. Timpat - Thanks for checking. I have an idea it's because the software I'm using (and you too, possibly) is giving each generated map the same product ID...so it 'thinks' the 3, 4, 5 maps are only one map when it generated the list to display (on the enable/disable screen) Mr Kaswa - I assumed that if you dropped several GPX files in there, all containing a bunch of tracks, it would just glob all the track together in the track manager and disregard what GPX they live in. If you can have multiple tracks in each GPX, and show/hide by GPX file, that would be a solution. I'll be trying that in a few minutes. Thanks for the info!!!!! Red90 - On your advice, I poked around the Interwebs for software that would change the Product IDs. Check my post, I'm using MapSetToolkit now, but regardless of how I set the transparency settings, the darn map it spits out isn't transparent. Maybe in the process of creating a GPX, converting the gpx to an img, then using a 3rd program to twiddle the img and stuff it into Basecamp, something is seeing something the other software did and saying..."Uhh..no." and not playing nice. I was in the process of taking screenshots of the different trail systems and then was going to add that image as a layer in google earth and then save it as a custom map and it will overlay on top of my.....you get the idea. I'm pretty sure that would work....but I'm going to try the Mr Kaswa suggestion now.
  9. Because I don't want to. The ATV trails around here change with the seasons. During spring, summer, fall, anyone can use the trails that are designated snowmobile only during the winter. Trails that are frozen and groomed in the winter may be bottomless swamp in the summer. The ATV clubs generally don't groom all the trails in their regions. So, those are some of the reasons I'd like to be able to create several different IMGs, and enable them and disable them as I like.
  10. This is sort of a spin-off of my other post, but here's the jist of what I'm doing, and what I'm having problems with. I want a LOT of saved tracks on my GPS...I ATV a lot, and have over 1000kms of trails within an hour or so drive. SO... I've been using GPX2IMG to create a transparent layer of tracks..that works A-1. But, I'd like to have a separate img for the trails for (ex) area #1, area #2, etc. I tried the obvious, creating an IMG of area#1 with GPX2IMG, it installs to Basecamp, then I can send it to the Oregon. Then I go rename it on the card so I can repeat the process with area #2.....and then #3, and so on. It sort of works..... What I end up with is each of the renamed IMGs on the card, and the GPS will display ALL the tracks from ALL the IMGs, but (I believe) because GPX2IMG or Basecamp is causing the product ID to be the same for each transparent layer, the Oregon only lists ONE of the GPX2IMG img's in the enable/disable area. (It lists TopoCanada, CN North America, etc just fine but where there should be 3 or 4 GPX2IMG maps, it only 'sees' one product ID so it assumes they're all the same map.) I have tried playing with the names of the GPX files, the mapset name in the options of GPX2IMG, and everything else I can think of. Same result. On the advise of a poster in my other thread, I searched out a tool that could change the Product ID, and found MapSet Toolkit (in conjunction with CGPSMapper). This might work, but it takes my transparent IMG, and makes it non-transparent. I have changed the transparency settings in MapSet Toolkit, and also the priority, no no avail. The img lays over the topo map on the GPS, but the area that the img covers is white, but does have the tracks shown. I have tried allowing it to install the img into basecamp, and pushing it to the GPS from there, and also NOT installing it into Basecamp, and just copying over the IMG but the results are the same each way. Can anyone recommend a tool that will just change the product ID (Or whatever non-unique value is causing the maps to all be seen as one) or maybe point out what I'm doing wrong? Thanks in advance!!!! <><
  11. Not sure if you already got a GPS, but hopefully you read up on the compass before you bought. Non-electronic compass: Gps looks at where you are, then at where you WERE, determines which way you moved, and can then tell you North is THAT way, and orient your map correctly. Stop, and the GPS is directionally lost. It knows the exact spot on the earth that it occupies, but it can't tell you which way North or South is. The other thing it can't do it correctly orient your map when you're stopped (in track UP mode). The only way it can figure that out is if you start moving again. I use mine a lot on my ATV and the 60CSX mounted nearly vertical (electronic compass but not 3-axis) would get confused as soon as I stopped, and flip the map upside down or sideways. Electronic Compass: When you stop, or slow to nearly stopped, the GPS stops trying to figure out which direction you're facing by the 'where you are vs where you were a second ago) method, and switches to the compass for reference when it tries to say "the cache is THAT way", or "Here's your map, still oriented correctly...go ahead, turn in a circle, I'll STILL orient the map correctly" Most buyers I talk to say exactly the same thing..it's not worth the extra for an electronic compass when you carry a magnetic compass anyway. After explaining how the electronic compass works with the map when you're stopped, etc, they often opt for the electronic compass. Some folks on here don't see the value in it, and don't like them at all. To each his own.
  12. I'm using GPX2IMG (not IMG2GPS)....just to clarify. I'm not sure if it's the way the Oregon works, or if it's the way that GPS2IMG installs the map into Basecamp. But like I say, it'll generate a transparent layer, and I can go onto the card and rename it, then generate another one, rename IT, etc etc.... I thinks it's because of the way that GPX2IMG installs them as a map product with some ID tag or something, they all have the same 'tag', so the Oregon thinks it's one map, and only shows 1 GPX2IMG map in the enable/disable list, yet displays ALL the tracks from the several GPX2IMG-created imgs sitting in the Gpx folder.
  13. This is sort of a 2-fold post.....a helpful hint, and a question... It's about loading 1000's of tracks/trails on your GPS and having them overlay the map (a transparent overlay) and not being bound to the 20, 100, 200, or whatever limit your unit has on the amount of tracks it can work with. If that doesn't interest you, you might as well stop reading here. :-) I use my Oregon 450 for ATVing, and geocaching. I often don't know which direction I'll be going in when I leave the house...so I like to have ALL the trails I have collected on my GPS. That number works out to be thousands. With my 60CSx I used Mapsource and GPX2IMG. I'd save a GPX with a butt-load of trails in it, open it with GPX2IMG, it makes a transparent layer and installs it in Mapsource as a map product, then transfer the map to the GPS and it overlays all the trails on top of whatever map product I have enabled (City navigator north America, TopoCanada, etc) if you've never used GPX2IMG, get it. Awesome awesome stupid-easy way to make a transparent overlay. And you can specify a different colour and thickness for whatever tracks you like. I recently switched to an Oregon 450 and the newer units don't play well with Mapsource so i made the switch to Basecamp. The process is essentially the same...export a 'list' of trails from Basecamp as a GPX, open the GPX with GPX2IMG, it installs as a map in Basecamp, transfer to the Oregon. Something super cool, or super annoying that I found out is that you can send the GPX2IMG map to the GPS, then rename it from the default name it gives a map image to whatever you like.....but once it has a unique name, you can repeat the process with another GPX, and another, and another.... Just rename them after sending them to the unit, or card. The cool (or not cool) thing is, say you send 5 (or whatever) .img's to the GPS and rename them all to something different.....the GPS will display ALL of the tracks in ALL of the GPX2IMG images that sit in the /garmin/GPX folder. The irritation is that in the enable/disable list, it only 'sees' one GPX2IMG map, so you can't enable/disable them independently. The work around for that is to create a folder called 'Disabled GPX2IMG Maps' (or whatever you like) and move the transparent overlays you don't want to see into that folder. I ride year round, and if you're not on a groomed train in the winter, you're up to your neck in snow....there's also groomed trails in the winter that cross miles of bottomless bog that are impassable in the summer, so the trails you can run in the summer are different from the trails you can run in the winter. There are 5 club trail systems within an hour of me, so I can have an overlay for each of the club systems, or one overlay with all combined. Then I can have another overlay with each clubs groomed trails in it, or have one with ALL the groomed trails in it, etc etc.... I can have the groomed trails blue, and the summer trails red....or assign a different colour to trails belonging to each club, and so on. Then, I can drop the .imgs into the GPX folder or the 'Disabled' folder, depending on which ones I want to see depending on the time of year. I can also take my 'All Trails' .img and move it to the 'Disabled' folder once the snow lays in, and just leave img's that contain groomed trails in the active (/Gpx) folder. You could also use this system to hide the thousands of tracks you may not want cluttering the map up....say, hide all the ATV trails if you're out for a day of hiking, etc... Hopefully that yammering might plant a seed for someone......I know I struggled for ages with trying to have all the trails in my area on my GPS, and fought with complicated ways of making a transparent overlay out of them. A while back I found GPX2IMG and holy crap.... all I can say is, get it. In all honesty, GSAK and GPX2IMG are the only two programs I've ever shelled out money for. I believe the free version of GPX2IMG will do everything that the paid version will do, except being able to load multiple GPXs together and build a Garmin map out of them. This is a non-issue, because you can just combine everything you want and export it all in one GPX in the first place. regardless, it was a life saver so I paid the creator the $16 or whatever it was. Another cool think it will do is include waypoints in the overlay it creates, if you have waypoints in your GPX that you feed to it. This is great if you have a bunch of waypoints that never change and you just like seeing them on the map...warming shelters, park and drop areas, rest stops, etc. They become part of the overlay and live in the map, and not in your actual waypoints list on the GPS. I have no ties to GSAK or GPX2IMG, but both are awesome pieces of software. Now, my question..(for any of you that are still awake after that snoozefest)....for those of you that use GPX2IMG already...have you found a way to have it build mapsets that the Oregon (likely all the recent models of Garmin handhelds behave the same) recognizes each map as a different map in the enable/disable screen? If so, please share. :-)
  14. With that unit, you can also use GSAK to generate a GPX that you can then load onto the unit with Garmin's POI Loader. I do it with my 60csx, and by using POIs instead of waypoints, I can have the name, part of the description, the type of cache, container, hint, found/not-found results of the last 4 logs, etc. It's not paperless, but it's a poor man's version.
  15. I have never had to re-calibrate the compass! Ever.... I bought it Tuesday. Sorry....I had to. The electronic compass comments were around my 60csx...electronic but not 3-axis...and the RAM mount holds it about a 45 degree angle on the ATV so most times it was confused which was north was (when stopped) unless you took it out of the RAM mount and held it flat. I just had the e-compass discussion with a co-worker who was GPS shopping a few days ago. "Why would I need a compass?? I always have a compass with me anyway...." And that's what a lot of people think....but the nice features of the compass show up when you're stopped and your map continues to orient properly, and when you get close to a cache and you don't have to keep walking back and forth so the GPS can know which way north is.
  16. I just bought an Oregon 450 for $196 at Costco...$199 if you buy it off their site. That's Canadian, so I'd guess they'd be even cheaper in the US Costcos? There's a few other online places I found the 450 for $199, but Costco is right up the street and has a 90-day satisfaction policy.... I recently picked up a mint eTrex 20 on Kijiji for $125 which was a great deal, but I didn't care for the small screen and joystick control. I played around with it for an evening, and sold it. The 450 screen is a good size, and the touch screen works very well.... Lots of people debate the electronic compass, but if you understand how it works and how it compliments the navigation, it's well worth having (in my opinion). I use my GPS on the handlebar of my ATV a lot, and trying to sort out intersecting trails when you're stopped is a pain when the map may be upside down, sideways, etc. The eTrex 20 does NOT have the electronic compass, or wireless...the 450 does. The 30 has them, but runs around $250..... The 450 is $50 cheaper than the 30, and has a bigger screen, touch screen, 3-axis electronic compass, and wireless.....each choice, in my opinion.
  17. I do that too Been using GPS2IMG for a couple years now. Great software. Sometimes it's nice to use tracks though.
  18. Maybe someone can figure how to use this glitch as a 'hack' to enable you to set all tracks as "Show On Map"....I have a ton of ATV trails on mine, and am constantly editing them on the PC and reloading them, so it's a PAIN to have to go into each one, and set it to show. The top item on my wishlist is a way to set all to "Show On Map", or to be able to set it as a parameter of the track in Basecamp so it's always shown on the GPSr after export.
  19. Thanks guys. I guess my roadblock was thinking that items had to be imported into the My Collections bin, THEN sorted. I'd like to get completely away from Mapsource, since it's only working now because of a work-around I was able to find online (Download the mapsource update, extract the files, install, update, then install TopoCanada V4, allowing you to use Mapsource or Basecamp since it's no longer included with map products)...I'm assuming that it will likely be impossible to use it at all soon, so I don't want to get caught flat-footed, so to speak.
  20. So I can import into a specific folder? Ohhhh... I was under the impression that you had to just had a generic "Import" function, that would import it into My Collection and then you had to sort it from there. If I can import into a specific folder, that will work.. ....It still goes into My Collection, but it's also all referenced in the 'Import' folder, then it can also be deleted right from that folder, right? (Deleted completely, rather than just 'removed' from the list....) Correct?
  21. And this is the problem... I get that Basecamp stores all data in one area and the folders and lists are just references to it. I have years worth of saved tracks and trails in GDB files from Mapsource. In order to grab one waypoint or track out of one of those GDB files (which may contain 100 waypoints and 50 tracks), I need to import it....resulting in 100 waypoints and 50 tracks being added to My Collection, 99% of which I had no interest in, and now it's gobbed in with my own data. With Mapsource, I would just open a 2nd instance of Mapsource, open that GDB with it, edit the waypoint/track I wanted, then copy it and paste it into the 1st instance of Mapcource. Say there's 10 ATV clubs in my area...they're close-by so the members of each club all ride each others trails. Meaning, when someone sends you a file of 'their' trails (tracks), the vast majority of the data in their file will be duplicates of data I already have....they will all be named differently, and the track points will not be the same, but it will be the same track. Their file will have all the same bridges, warming huts, fuel stops as mine, but with different names and everything. After importing a couple people's files to grab tracks/points that I might not have, I can only imagine the mess of overlaying tracks and waypoints I'll end up with. Imagine you're a hiker, and you hike a 500 square mile area. You have the tracks of the hikes you've done but get track files from 10 other hikers so you can add their hikes to your data and follow their tracks someday. You import their files and now you have 10 tracks for the same section of trail...yours, that was called "Aug 14 - Day Hike", plus another one from hiker A called "Active Log 7014267" and a 3rd called "Trail Where Bob Pooped Behind A Rock", etc etc... You already have a nice track for that trail, saved by you, cleaned up, named the way you want it.....you don't want theirs, but you've got it. <--- The problem. Having different databases would possibly work....have your main database, then have one called 'Editing' that you could open, import a bunch of junk, pick out the pieces you want, export them for use in your 'good' database, then delete everything in the 'Editing' database. Here's what I'm whining about: I have a bucket of Smarties. I want 2 blue Smarties from a friend. Mapsource: Walk over to his bucket, pick out the two blue smarties I want, walk over to my bucket, drop them in. Basecamp: Dump my friend's entire bucket of Smarties in with my bucket of Smarties, stir them up, then try to find two blue ones that came from his bucket, then pick out and throw away the other 10,000 smarties that came from his bucket, because I didn't want those in the first place. Even though I have my smarties itemized on paper (one list for my red ones, one list for my brown ones, etc) that doesn't change the fact that the smarties I already had, the smarties I wanted, and the smarties I don't want are now all mixed together in one big bucket. I can use that last folder in my lists (Unauthorized Smarties)and delete everything in it, but only if I carefully categorized my smarties the last time I added some of my own....if I happened to spend an hour editing a couple smarties a week ago and forgot to add them to a list, they will get lost in the jumble and deleted too. Is that analogy pretty close to reality, or am I missing the boat completely?
  22. Well, giving this a little bump.....I used the 20 a bit and ended up selling it to get an Oregon 450 instead. Given that this pain of going into EACH track and selecting 'Show On Map' is common to all the handhelds running similar software, my question stands. :-) Bumping in hopes that there might be a way to have the GPSr show all tracks by default, or to flag them in Basecamp to show on the map before sending them to the unit.
  23. Hey folks...I'll apologize in advance for what will be a wordy post, but hard to sum up in one line. I've been using Mapsource for years and am making the move to Basecamp. What I'm having a hard time sorting out is how to use Basecamp to access my data the way I used to. I understand that Basecamp works more like a database and Mapsource works more like a file/folder structure, so..... I mainly use Mapsource (now Basecamp) for ATVing data. (hundreds of waypoints and hundreds of tracks) I was used to saving separate files (of waypoints and tracks) by date, area, event, etc. Also, after every ride, I'd open Mapsource and dump everything on the GPS into it and save it in a folder named with the date and the area the ride took place. That way, if I was looking for a particular section of trail that we took that hot day in August of 2010, and wanted to go back there, I could easily find it. Now, it would seem that in order to do the same thing, I'd have to have a million tracks and such, all living in 'My Collection'. I also have a large amount of gdb files that I've collected and traded with other riders, so if I have one of their 'master' gdb's, chances are that 80% of the data in it is tracks/waypoints that I already have in My Collection but with different names/icons/etc, so to import it into Basecamp and duplicate all that data would just be a nightmare. Is there a way to isolate data with Basecamp? Ex: This weekend we're going to that same area as we went that hot day in August 2010. How can I open that saved gpx/gdb file now that I'm using Basecamp, grab the track(s) I want to put in the GPS, and not have to import it in with all my other data, resulting in a big mess....? I guess I could run a Basecamp backup, then delete everything in Basecamp, import the saved 'dump' file, do whatever I wanted with it, then delete everything again and restore from the backup...but that's just dumb. :-p The nice thing about Mapsource was how you could work with as many individual files of data as you wanted and they never had to get tangled up with each other....how are you all handling similar tasks in Basecamp? Thanks!!!!!!
  24. Yep. I've been using GPX2IMG to build transparent IMGs for the 60CSx and that's been a good solution so far, but I was hoping to be able to simplify things by being able to take advantage of the 200 tracks on the Etrex20. It's looking like having to go into each track and display it on the map is going to be the wrench in the gears of that plan... Garmin! Menu button - Show All Tracks On Map You listening?? :-)
  25. Thanks for the info. I'm looking at having close to the 200 limit on there, and they get edited and updated frequently.
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