Riccardo M. asks:
When I send waypoints from PC to my Garmin GPS 38, only 70% of waypoints go inside. We don’t have the problem with Garmin GPS 76, thanks.
After looking at Riccardo’s GPS data, I was able to find the reason why not all of his waypoints were transferring to his Garmin GPS 38. His other GPS, a Garmin GPS 76, allows up to 10 characters in waypoint names. The older GPS 38 only can handle 6-character waypoints. When Riccardo sent data from his GPS 76 to his GPS 38, the GPS 38 truncated each waypoint after the sixth character.
All Garmin GPS receivers require waypoints to have unique names. If you have a waypoint named HOME in your GPS, and you send a new waypoint named HOME to your GPS using ExpertGPS or any other software, it will overwrite the first waypoint.
The waypoints in Riccardo’s GPS 76 all had unique names (they have to) but these were 10-character names. Some of them started with the same 6 characters. When these waypoints were truncated to six characters, they now had the same names, and overwrote each other.
Here’s an example of two unique waypoints on a GPS 76 that will produce the same name (PARKIN) on a GPS 38: PARKINGLOT and PARKINREAR.
Confirming the data on your GPS receiver
If you are sending data from one GPS to another, it’s a good idea to check the data after you send it to the new GPS to make sure all of your data transferred over correctly. To do this, create a new, blank file in ExpertGPS, and receive all data from the new GPS. Switch to the Waypoint List, and Select All. In the lower left corner of the main window, you’ll see the number of waypoints selected. Compare this number to the number of waypoints in your original data file. If it is less, you’ve lost some waypoints. Check for non-unique waypoint names!
Related Topics
What happened to the waypoints I just downloaded to my Garmin GPS?
