Lowrance User With A Question

[+Airmapper]

I'm looking for a way to make my caching system easier. I have a Lowrance setup, an Airmap 500 (Basically a I-Finder Pro with aviation features), Mapcreate 6.3 Topo, and a 512MB SD card.

 

(I'm not a premium member and don't want to become one just yet.) Here is what I do, I download one page of caches at a time to .loc files via EasyGPS. I combine the files copy/ paste into one EasyGPS file, then copy/ paste to Word where I clean up the format (That is a huge mess) to mach what Mapcreate will accept as an imported waypoint list. Then I load them to the GPS and can pretty much handle it from there. I do not want to buy any more equipment other than what I have now. (Like a Data cord or more software.)

 

Mapcreate will accept this as an imported waypoint list,

36.xxxxxxxx, 086.xxxxxxxx, GCxxxx

36.xxxxxxxx, 086.xxxxxxxx, GCxxxx

and so on.

 

Any thoughts will be appriciated.

Airmapper

[Hoary]

You can use GPSBabel (freeware, http://www.gpsbabel.org/ ) in order to convert *.loc files directly to Lowrance *.USR format. Read this thread how to do this:

 

http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php...topic=98802&hl=

 

And there is at least two ways to combine multiple *.loc files into one:

 

1. GPSBabel can do this from command line (but not through GUI). Command is

"gpsbabel -i geo -f 1.loc -f 2.loc -f 3.loc -o geo -F big.loc".

You can find this in documentation.

 

2. Using free utility 'EasyGPS Companion': http://www.factsfacts.com/geocachingsoft/EZCompanion.htm

Edited September 11, 2005 by Hoary

[+Airmapper]

Thanks, I had looked at GPSbabel but coulden't find proof that it supported Mapcreate .usr files. Thanks for the link to the other thread as well, looks like it might help.

Airmapper

[robertlipe]

Search for the words "Mapcreate" and "usr" at http://www.gpsbabel.org/readme.html and you'll find that GPSBabel does support them. The first is exactly what GPSBabel calls the "CSV" format and what's used by a number of programs. USR is a very different beast, but it supports that, too.

 

See also: http://www.gpsbabel.org/capabilities.html

[+Airmapper]

I hit a snag

 

I downloaded GPSBabel but have no idea how to Unzip it, I suspect my computer doesn't have the software to do this but I could just not know how. I have tried to unzip files before but with no sucess.

 

Any more suggestions?

[Hoary]

I guess operating system you are using is not Windows XP.

 

You can find a lot of links to different tools for unzipping here

 

http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php...105276&hl=unzip

 

I would recommend 7zip (free):

 

http://www.7-zip.org/

Edited September 11, 2005 by Hoary

[+Airmapper]

Thanks, I'm running on Windows 98 SE. I'm downloading the program you suggested right now.

[+Airmapper]

Got 7-zip running and extracted GPSbabel files. I think I got Babel running, but it isn't working right. I'll work on it some more and try to get it running.

 

Thanks for all the help, I may need more yet, but I'll work with what I got.

 

Airmapper

---------------

Edited for update

 

I got it running, it displayed a bunch of benchmarks in Mapcreate, I have more experimenting to do but looks good, Thanks a lot, this beats the heck out of trying to convert it manually.

Edited September 11, 2005 by Airmapper