| Cooter 2007-09-12, 3:33 pm |
| Maybe I'm the only person in GPS-land who didn't know this, but just in case
there is someone else out there who doesn't, I learned something interesting
about custom POIs. There has been some discussion in the NGs about what
could be stored on microSD cards. It appears that Garmin's POI Loader stores
your custom POIs on the microSD card if your unit uses one. I posted
something a couple of weeks ago about there being extra space on the card
even after MapSource had transferred the maximum size map - 1936.9 MB on a 2
GB card. It turns out that what MapSource calls 1936 MB is only about 188 MB
on the card, leaving about 53 MB.
If you have loaded custom POIs into your unit, check the card on a card
reader and you will find a "POI" folder inside the "Garmin" folder. Inside
this folder is "poi.gpi" which contains your custom POIs. If you open this
file with a hex editor you will recognize the names and descriptions of your
custom POIs.
The question has been asked about how many custom POIs can be stored. Garmin
says more than 3,000. Another source says he has stored more than 23,000. I
use .csv files with an average line length of about 55 or 60 characters. My
total of 455 POIs is stored in the poi.gpi file in 37.7 KB. Based on that, I
could store nearly 650,000 POIs in my remaining 53 MB!
One other important observation that should be obvious - the microSD card
you have in the unit when you run POI Loader is the only card that contains
your custom POIs. If you swap cards for whatever reason your custom POIs
won't show up. So if you use multiple cards, you need to run POI Loader with
each card inserted.
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