I Need Some Clarification

[+flash packers]

I'm a recent newbie to the world of geocaching and GPS. I recently purchased a 60 CX and thanks to the posts on this board I'm slowing gaining a better understanding of what I need to do. I have to say that there is a wealth of knowledgable folks on this forum and it's helping me alot. I just finished reading about downloading geocache locations from Geocache.com and I thought I would need software such as EasyGPS as one of the many examples to convert the .loc files to .gpx before uploading to the the GPS. Interestingly, I picked a series of locations on the website and hit download. The files appeared in Mapsource as Geocache waypoints. I then selected them all and hit transfer to GPS at which point they all uploaded and appeared on the GPS. I guess I'm confused because I thought I couldn't do that without additional software. Am I missing something here or is some of the information around outdated do to recent changes/improvements by Garmin. By the way I'm running vers. 2.70/2.50.

[+Lasagna]

I'm a recent newbie to the world of geocaching and GPS. I recently purchased a 60 CX and thanks to the posts on this board I'm slowing gaining a better understanding of what I need to do. I have to say that there is a wealth of knowledgable folks on this forum and it's helping me alot. I just finished reading about downloading geocache locations from Geocache.com and I thought I would need software such as EasyGPS as one of the many examples to convert the .loc files to .gpx before uploading to the the GPS. Interestingly, I picked a series of locations on the website and hit download. The files appeared in Mapsource as Geocache waypoints. I then selected them all and hit transfer to GPS at which point they all uploaded and appeared on the GPS. I guess I'm confused because I thought I couldn't do that without additional software. Am I missing something here or is some of the information around outdated do to recent changes/improvements by Garmin. By the way I'm running vers. 2.70/2.50.

 

Mapsource is indeed one of those "additional" pieces of software which you need in order to upload waypoints. Garmin just happens to include it with your GPSr. It's not an overly functional piece of software, but for transferring waypoints, it'll do just fine.

[+geobc]

helping me alot. I just finished reading about downloading geocache locations from Geocache.com and I thought I would need software such as EasyGPS as one of the many examples to convert the .loc files to .gpx before uploading to the the GPS. Interestingly, I picked a series of locations on the website and hit download. The files appeared in Mapsource as Geocache waypoints. I then selected them all and hit transfer to GPS at which point they all uploaded and appeared on the GPS. I guess I'm confused because I thought I couldn't do that without additional software. Am I missing something here or is some of the information around outdated do to recent changes/improvements by Garmin.

You used to need some kind of converter software to convert from GPX or LOC to a Mapsource-readable format (eg: GDB). However, the latest versions of Mapsource can now read GPX files directly (as you have discovered).

 

GeoBC

[+Renegade Knight]

In the old days (something like last year) Mapsource didn't handle GPX or LOC files. Then you needed EasyGPS to upload cache waypoints from this site to your GPS.

 

Now Garmin has upgraded Mapsource to where it can read those files and now you don't need EasyGPS.

Edited May 16, 2006 by Renegade Knight