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Importing 300 waypoints?


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I'm looking for suggestions on the easiest/quickest way to import all 300 Sandia Mountains waypoints. I've tried EasyGPS but it won't import. I've tried G7toWIN but get numerous errors during the import (I had it configured to Magellan and the right baud rate).

 

I have a MeriPlat, Mapsend TOPO USA, and am running Windows 2000 Professional.

 

While I'm at it, is it even wise to have this many waypoints on the GPS at once? Will the icons be overwhelming on the screen?

 

TIA,

 

CheesyD

 

"Blessed are the cheesemakers, for they shall inherit the earth."

--Monty Python's The Life of Brian

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When you try to use G7ToWin, what kind of error are you getting? I suspect that G7ToWin is having problems reading the data, rather than having problems loading it into your MeriPlat. What kind of manipulation have you already done trying to get g7towin to load it?

 

-- Mitch

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You need to import the data into Excel, parse out the degree and minute markers, and covert to degrees.degrees for importing into G7toWin. I did it using Excel, the FIND and MID functions, saved it as a CSV file, and successfully loaded all 305 waypoints into G7toWin. Email me at teamcnjc@earthlink.net and I'll send you the files.

 

As far as cluttering up the screen - yes, it will. However, you can turn off waypoint display in the map setup, if desired.

 

ExpertGPS is another alternative.

 

-Craig/TeamCNJC

 

... Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took off through the thorns, chest high, ...

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Actually, if you follow a couple of the links, you can find a version already suitable for importing into Excel. I then used a saved waypoint csv file from g7towin as a guide, and with a little cut-n-paste, I made a csv file suitable for importing into g7towin. You can download it from:

 

http://www.sonic.net/~mrp/Images/geocaching/sandia.csv

 

If you download that, it should import nicely into g7towin. From there you can upload it to your MeriPlat.

 

-- Mitch

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quote:
If you download that, it should import nicely into g7towin. From there you can upload it to your MeriPlat.

 

Thanks Mitch and Craig! I've downloaded the sandia.csv file and will try getting it onto my MeriPlat this evening.

 

CheesyD

 

"Blessed are the cheesemakers, for they shall inherit the earth."

--Monty Python's The Life of Brian

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quote:
Originally posted by Pneumatic:

Actually, if you follow a couple of the links, you can find a version already suitable for importing into Excel. I then used a saved waypoint csv file from g7towin as a guide, and with a little cut-n-paste, I made a csv file suitable for importing into g7towin. You can download it from:

 

http://www.sonic.net/~mrp/Images/geocaching/sandia.csv

 

If you download that, it should import nicely into g7towin. From there you can upload it to your MeriPlat.

 

-- Mitch


 

There I was, all proud of myself! Now I actually have to get some work done... icon_frown.gif

 

Actually, CheesyD, if that doesn't work for you, let me know and I'll upload/download and get the waypoints into MapSend. I need to practice with that program...

 

-Craig/TeamCNJC

 

... Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took off through the thorns, chest high, ...

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quote:
Originally posted by Pneumatic:

Actually, if you follow a couple of the links, you can find a version already suitable for importing into Excel. I then used a saved waypoint csv file from g7towin as a guide, and with a little cut-n-paste, I made a csv file suitable for importing into g7towin. You can download it from:

 

http://www.sonic.net/~mrp/Images/geocaching/sandia.csv

 

If you download that, it should import nicely into g7towin. From there you can upload it to your MeriPlat.

 

-- Mitch


 

There I was, all proud of myself! Now I actually have to get some work done... icon_frown.gif

 

Actually, CheesyD, if that doesn't work for you, let me know and I'll upload/download and get the waypoints into MapSend. I need to practice with that program...

 

-Craig/TeamCNJC

 

... Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took off through the thorns, chest high, ...

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I used Mitch's Excel csv file to import the waypoints into G7toWIN. It spit out about 200 errors... all were "oops blah blah blah not written yet" messages. I just kept clicking OK and it went through all 305 waypoints. Once they were in G7toWIN I sent them to the GPS and then downloaded from there into Mapsend TOPO USA. All 305 were there but the elevations all read either 174 feet or 0 feet. Weird. I ended up manually changing all of those by clicking each one and getting the Mapsend elevation reading. Also the last 1/3 or so of the waypoints lost their descriptions somewhere along the way so I had to enter those manually as well. All in all took me a couple of hours but I have them all saved in a .wpt file now. If anyone wants a copy let me know and I'll be glad to forward it on.

 

Thanks again to all those who offered assistance. Much appreciated!

 

CheesyD

 

"Blessed are the cheesemakers, for they shall inherit the earth."

--Monty Python's The Life of Brian

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Others answered your question about the specific import but sort of left this one alone. Here's my shot at help...

quote:
While I'm at it, is it even wise to have this many waypoints on the GPS at once? Will the icons be overwhelming on the screen?


I frequently pack 400+ on my 330. It isn't without hazards. If you do things like zoom out to the 25+ mile range while driving (assuming you have 'waypoints on map' turned on, of course) the unit goes into some kind of weird error state where it starts beeping and displays a blank box where the error should be. It seems to recover in a few seconds.

 

Sorting and scrolling through the waypoints can be a little groggy but not terrible. If often takes a low number of seconds while it does its thing to "nearest by location" or "nearest by city" with that many. You'll want to be careful with your searching and sorting while carting around that many waypoints, but if you need that many, it's tractable.

 

There also seems to be some kind of weird thing that I haven't fully characterized about the waypoint comments. If lots of your waypoints have long comments (I use the full titles of the geocaches in mine) and you're carrying zillions of waypoints, some of them get lost. So I don't know if you can really jam the cited 500 waypoints if they all have long (25-30byte) comments associated with them.

 

Just remember to turn off waypoint displays if you really need to see the screen while zoomed out and you'll be fine.

 

Also remember that shuffling around that many waypoints in one operation increases the odds of triggering some subtle bug in the software you use. Maybe cache #374 is the "$600 cache" and your software doesn't correctly vaporize the $ that delimits the NMEA sentences. Maybe cache #417 has just the right combination of quotes to trigger some erroneous expansion somewhere. It can be hard to diagnose for the casual user and it will often appear that smaller numbers of imports work when in reality it's just that the smaller numbers are less likely to get nailed by this sort of thing.

 

After a little practice, I don't bat an eye at stuffing 400+ into my unit.

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quote:
Originally posted by CheesyD:

I used Mitch's Excel csv file to import the waypoints into G7toWIN. It spit out about 200 errors...


 

Hmm.... I wonder why that happened. It loaded into my copy of g7towin just fine. I didn't upload them to the GPS, only because I have no interest in those 300 waypoints. Maybe you have a different version of g7towin. I use version A.00.116. The altitude I'll cop to, since it was part of what I cut-n-pasted from another waypoint to use as a template. I don't know why it came out zero in one or two places.

 

-- Mitch

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quote:
Hmm.... I wonder why that happened. It loaded into my copy of g7towin just fine. I didn't upload them to the GPS, only because I have no interest in those 300 waypoints.

 

The errors occurred in G7toWIN while I was doing the upload to the GPS. Importing your csv file into G7toWIN worked like a charm.

 

CheesyD

 

"Blessed are the cheesemakers, for they shall inherit the earth."

--Monty Python's The Life of Brian

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