DeLorme PN-40: Difference between revisions
Brian Wilson (talk | contribs) |
Brian Wilson (talk | contribs) |
||
| Line 65: | Line 65: | ||
Remove your old Ubuntu version if you have one. | Remove your old Ubuntu version if you have one. | ||
sudo apt-get remove gpsbabel | sudo apt-get remove gpsbabel | ||
(If you had | (If you had the Unbuntu version installed then you should also tell the shell to forget about the old version by entering the command "hash -r".) | ||
Now if you type "gpsbabel -h" at the command prompt you should get a lengthy list of supported formats that includes this block | Now if you type "gpsbabel -h" at the command prompt you should get a lengthy list of supported formats that includes this block | ||
Revision as of 03:07, 25 July 2009
I have been using a PN40 for about 2 months now.
Originally I thought I'd sell my Garmin eTrex Vista HCX but now I am glad I did not.
The PN40 needs more polish. (That's a very short review isn't it.)
Software and maps for the PN-40
Topo 8.0
It appears to be very inaccurate. When I have an aerial photo loaded, I can see myself walking right down the sidewalk in the photo but the street overlay will be 5 or so meters off.
Street Atlas 2009
maybe it's accurate, but forget it, you can't transfer SA data into the PN40.
XMap 6.2
It's basically Topo 8 with some extra features.
USB to Serial
There is a program on the DeLorme site that you can use to take the live data coming in over USB and fan it out as one or more NMEA serial data streams. This means you can feed several client programs running on a Windows desktop machine at the same time. It also means you might not have to do anything at all with the binary protocol if you just want to get NMEA position data.
Binary protocol
The "DeLBin" (DeLorme Binary) Protocol spec is downloadable from the DeLorme forums as a PDF.
GPSbabel
July 2009 - Currently to get DeLBin support in gpsbabel you need to compile from cvs sources.
It seems to work fine on my Ubuntu desktop.
Here is a command to transfer waypoints from the PN-40 device to a GPX file.
sudo ./gpsbabel -i delbin -f usb -o gpx -F test.gpx
(I used "sudo" because I have a permissions issue with the USB device that I should fix!)
Links -- GPSbabel home page and the GPSBabel DelBin page
Building gpsbabel from sources
Login to server
cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/gpsbabel login
Checkout source code - this will create a gpsbabel directory right here.
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/gpsbabel co -P gpsbabel
I needed to install one package to get the usb.h file.
apt-get install libusb-dev
Build and install
./configure make sudo make install
Remove your old Ubuntu version if you have one.
sudo apt-get remove gpsbabel
(If you had the Unbuntu version installed then you should also tell the shell to forget about the old version by entering the command "hash -r".)
Now if you type "gpsbabel -h" at the command prompt you should get a lengthy list of supported formats that includes this block
delbin DeLorme PN-20/PN-30/PN-40 USB protocol get_posn (0/1) Return current position as a waypoint logs (0/1) Include groundspeak logs when writing long_notes (0/1) Use long waypoint notes regardless of PN ver
ArcMap support
You can buy the $250 ArcMap extension, I have a copy now and have tried it once or twice. You can move vector GIS data into the device and you can move data from the device into shapefiles without any extra steps. It seems very nice so far.
Jumping through some hoops, if you want to work with Topo 8 you can transfer track(s) from the PN-40 to a desktop, then in the Draw tab you can export the tracks as GPX data. Then you can convert the GPX files to ESRI shapefiles using DNR Garmin.
