POI’s What do you load?

[Lostby7]

Reading Dave’s post in another thread it got me to wondering….What kind of “Custom Points of Interest” (POIs) do you upload to your Garmin Map60’s? I downloaded the software to my computer and would like to know what others feel is helpful to set up on their GPS as a POI….

[Team Hemisphere Dancer]

Gary,

Go on the GC.com forums in the gps software treads. There is a thread called something like Custom POI tricks. They have a lot of good ideas about how to use them. I have not tried them yet but it looks like good information.

[Cheesehead Dave]

I have one set of POIs I call “Keepers” which I created in Mapsource. Those are points like my house, my work, friend’s houses that we travel to, etc. They are saved as Keepers.gpx and kept in the POI folder. When searching for custom POIs on my 60CSx, if I go to the “Select Database” screen, “Keepers” will be one of the options so I can easily find one of those destinations for routing purposes.

These are the instructions I follow for getting caches into my unit as POIs along with custom icons.

I’m currently working on a GSAK macro to split out the exported caches by type so I can refer to them as separate databases. “Caches I’ve Found,” “Caches I Own,” “Unfound Caches,” etc.

I also export caches to the unit as Waypoints. By doing that, I can find them via the Geocaching Mode. By also having them in there as POIs, I can take advantage of the fact that unlike waypoints, (which are limited to fourteen-character names) POIs can have 44-character names and 88-character descriptions. My GSAK export puts the container size, the last four logs (F for found, 0 for DNF so it would show up as “F0FF”) the terrain/difficulty ratings, and as much of the decrypted hint as will fit in the remaining space. So while I use the waypoints to actually do the searching, if I need access to the other information, a quick trip to the Find Nearby Custom POI screen will get me what I need.

I also have the map set to show the waypoint icons at any zoom level below 2 miles and to hide the POI icons at above 200′. This lets me see where the caches are, but hides all the restaurant/gas station icons that I don’t want to see.

[hogrod]

There is gsak macro’s for exporting a gpx file for custom POI’s, but I just use the standard File, export, GPX/Loc.

I change the waypoint name to output to: %name-%code
with a max characters of 44

I also set the cache description output to: %con1-%hint=88 (%Dif/%Ter)
that way I get container + hint & difficulty/terrain

I export a GPX files for each database I have In gsak, then have them all in one folder for upload with garmins POI loader. you also can have custom Icon for each GPX file in there, you just have to use the same name for the custom image as the GPX file(16X16 bitmaps like normal garmin custom icons).

GSAK Export

My Garmin POI folder

[hogrod]

I should also say that all those custom Icons and gpx files end up being a 89kb poi.gpi file on the card, I think thats like 750 custom waypoints that take up less than 1mb of card space.
also you can search the custom POI’s in your gps by group name, you don’t need to search through all of them.

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