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Importing A Csv To A Garmin Etrex


cad-guy

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I am needing to upload a list of waypoints. They are currently in a csv format. "point, lat, long"

 

For some reason, I was thinking that I could use Easygps to import them and then export to my garmin etrex. It looks like the garmin only reads loc or gpx files. How can I get this csv file up to my garmin? ANy help will be greatly apreciated.

 

cad-guy

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I'm a little baffled at why you would involve GSAK in this. It seems a little like the "when all you have is a hammer" kind of solution. (GSAK is very good at what it does, but the data in question doesn't match the "G" in "GSAK.)

 

...and even if you use GPSBabel to bludgeon them into GSAK, since the goal was to get it into an Etrex, do you know how GSAK is going to get them there? Yep, it's going to hand them back to GPSBabel for the transfer.

 

Cad-guy, your files approximately match the gpsdrive format. It's not a perfect fit, but it's probably close enough. If you have control of the data, you can make it a perfect fit for a number of formats that GPSBabel does know. And if you don't, it's a trivial matter to whip up a style sheet that describes your data.

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So you tried gpsdrive and that didn't work? And you don't have enough control of the data to make the format match one of the bazillion forms already supported? OK, it's easy to teach GPSbabel new formats. Start with a description file, in my example I've named it "cg.style":

 

DESCRIPTION     Comma separated values
SHORTLEN        8
#
#
# FILE LAYOUT DEFINITIIONS:
#
FIELD_DELIMITER         COMMASPACE
RECORD_DELIMITER        NEWLINE
BADCHARS                COMMA

#
# INDIVIDUAL DATA FIELDS, IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:
#
IFIELD  DESCRIPTION, "", "%s"
IFIELD  LAT_HUMAN_READABLE, "", "%08.5f"
IFIELD  LON_HUMAN_READABLE, "", "%08.5f"

OFIELD  DESCRIPTION, "", "%s"
OFIELD  LAT_DECIMAL, "", "%08.5f"
OFIELD  LON_DECIMAL, "", "%08.5f"

 

(The astute observer will notice this is the 'csv.style' file from our distribution with the name moved to the front instead of the back. It's a tad more verbose than it may need to be be but since you didn't really specify the format of the coordinates, I sandbagged a little.)

 

Then just tell it to use that format on input or output. Now you can merge, filter, and generally party down with about six dozen formats.

 

To copy the waypoints in file 'wpts' to a serial garmin on windows, you might use:

 

gpsbabel -i xcsv,style=cg.style -f wpts -o garmin -F com1:

 

Enjoy.

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the only "control" over the data I have is in an excel spreadsheet, so I can arrange columns any way I want. If I could see the order that the file needs to be in for the csv format I could just do that, but I guess I don't get how to use the software. My colums are:

 

"description, lat, long", and thats all I have.

 

I guess I'm too hard headed to figure it out.

 

Mike

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The format that GPSBabel calls "CSV" is dicatated by what Delorme wanted. (Yeah, in hindsight, it was a bad choice of names on my part...) It is

 

decimal lat, decimal lon, description

 

Three fields, each separated by comma space. Put them in that order and you can suck them right into GPSBabel with the "csv" format.

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