Garmin EMap

Maps for eMap

My eTrex Vista is on loan to a friend so I have pulled my beloved trusty eMap out of retirement for a few days. AH.. such good times we've had together!

I tried loading a City Navigator map into the eMap tonight and it won't display. I looked up the eMap at the Garmin site and found there is no listing of any map data for it any more. So sad.

I still have many older CD's of data so no worry.

Getting waypoints into the eMap from ArcMap

1. Create a point shapefile in WGS84
2. Use GPSbabel (from http://www.gpsbabel.org/)

You can convert the shapefile to a GPX file and then edit the GPS to add xml "name" tags which will appear on the map in the eMap.

gpsbabel -i shape -f GarminWaypointsShapefile -o gpx -F Gar.gpx

If you are running on a Windows machine you can use the GPSBabel-GUI program so that you don't have to learn all the command line settings by heart.

Reading from Garmin eMap

Waypoints: gpsbabel -i garmin -f /dev/ttyS0 -o gpx -F current_waypoints.gpx

Tracks: gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f /dev/ttyS0 -o shape -F garmin_track

Sending data to Garmin eMap

Waypoints

I clear out unwanted points, delete all waypoints from the Garmin and then load the new points

gpsbabel -i gpx -f current_waypoints.gpx -o garmin -F /dev/ttyS0
gpsbabel -i gpx -f Gar.gpx -o garmin -F /dev/ttyS0