Re: Garmin Micro G-Charts - Is there Another way?

Richard Lane wrote:
Jack Erbes wrote:


This has now changed a little. Now, with the latest 5xx series marine chart plotters, you have to give up on uploading waypoints and routes from a PC and forget about wanting or needing RS-232 (or any other kind) of NMEA outputs.



Jack

Jack,
You can indeed upload way-points and routes (sequential way-points)from a pc to a Garmin 5xx by setting "communications" to Garmin i/o NMEA. If a named route then the 5xx display waits for you to select "forward" or "reverse" before joining the way-points with a colored line. I think I mentioned this in an earlier posting.

I think I remember that now. My apologies to Garmin.

I just looked at the manual for that again. I see it also has two RS-232 serial NMEA outputs and that means it will also support a DSC VHF radiotelephone and things like AIS too. So I was pretty much wrong about all of it.

In my defense, I noticed that I am seeing a Rev C manual dated August 2007. I remember the manual I looked at previously be a *lot* more vague on some of the technical details and assumed that if it was not mentioned it did not have it.

I notice it also says that the user data on the 545 (waypoints, routes, and tracks) can be saved to, merged from, or replaced with data from the SD card. It says nothing about the format, I'm wondering if that would be from a *.gpx file from MapSource?

As always, figuring out the details is a little painful. But between the product page and the manual I've get a better picture of this now and it is not as dumbed down as it appeared to be when it was new.

It will do 10,000 trackpoints, save an unstated number of tracks, store 1,500 waypoints, and 20 routes with up to 250 waypoints per route.

Another thing I notice is that, while all the 4xx and 5xx models are described as having the "Ability to add maps", none of them have any free main unit memory for adding user maps. And none of them are listed as compatible with the BlueChart charting that comes on CD-ROM. So the only method for adding charting to any of these is by buying the BlueChart G2 SD cards.

Many of us find the pre-loaded SD cards to be a grossly more expensive method for adding charting in comparison with the load you own from a CD-ROM method used some for earlier models (and that is still in use for some handhelds and other models).

For many boaters, the G2 SD cards come with a lot of features (3D bottom views, marine photo views, etc.) that are simply not wanted. So Garmin has once again, shut the door on previous generations of marine GPS users by not giving users of older systems any upgrade path but the one that Garmin has chosen for them.

Why in the hell Garmin does not include all the essential details of waypoint, route, and track capacities both on the product page and in the user's guide is just beyond my understanding. Many people, myself included, decided it was apparently quite dumbed down from previous models and that is not the case.

But, thanks for keeping me honest. :>)

Jack
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