Doing more with your GPS

[Fred W]

A lot of us own and use some pretty fancy Garmin GPSes on our FJRs. These units are darned sophisticated devices, and some of us can be a bit intimidated by the technology. My objective in this thread is to show you one way that you can make your GPS work harder for you when you are out on the road, by using POI files. By the way, POI stands for "Point Of Interest". So these could be any sort of a place that you would be interested in finding. I'll be demonstrating this on a zumo 550 GPS but it applies (with just minor variations) on many other Garmin GPS units.

We all know how to find the closest services (fuel, food lodging, etc.) just by pressing the "Where To" button on the Top Menu screen. It's pretty intuitive,m espcecially if you've ever used a simple automotive GPS. That's pretty much the only mode those type of units will operate in.

Then select the "Food, Lodging..." button on the upper right

And drill down to the category of POI we are interested in

This will allow you to find any of the POIs that are included in your current mapset. The older your maps version is, the more outdated the POIs will be. The POIs actually change much more often than the roads do.

But, did you know that you can also find the nearest POIs along your currently running route? Or the ones closest to your current route's final destination? Or even tell it a completely different city from where you are currently? To do that, you just press the "Near" button on the bottom of the last screen shot above, which brings you to this screen:

After selecting a different option and pressing OK, the POIs will subsequently be sorted based on their proximity to your new selection rather than Where I Am Now location. "My Current Route" can be really handy if your looking for gas or food and don't want to have to stray too far. Or "My Destination" is good for looking for hotels at the end of the day. "A Different City" is most useful if you already know a place exists and you know the name of the city/town it's in.

Once you find a POI that you like you can then save it for future reference by selecting the "Save" button at the lower right of the POI screen before you press "Go." It then gets added to your "Favorites" list.

 
 
So that is how you can find the POIs that exist in your mapset. But that POI database, though fairly extensive, is not complete. There are some that are missing and many types of POIs that are not included at all, so that is where "Custom POIs" come in.

Custom POIs are just what they seem to be, a list of your own locations that you add to the GPS. They can be any category of locations that you might find useful. For instance, on my GPS I have custom POI files for all of the Yamaha Dealerships in the US and Canada, and also one with the FJR Assist list in it. Those could obviously come in quite handy when away on a trip. I also have one for all of the Covered Bridges in New Hampshire and another for Vermont, a file with all of the Lighthouses on the entire East Coast, one with all the State Parks in New Hampshire, a file with Free Wi-Fi locations throughout the US (mostly restaurants), another file with all of the New Hampshire State Liquor Store locations, and even the new file we are compiling in the NERDS Ride To Eat List thread.

But wait, you say... Why have the NERDS Ride To Eat restaurant list in a Custom POI file? Aren't all of those restaurants already in the mapset's POIs? Well, most are. But there have been quite a few that were not, and I've had to create the POIs from scratch using an address gleaned off of a Google search.

But there is an even bigger technical reason to keep these lists as Custom POI files rather than as saved "Favorites" and that is to keep your "Favorites" list less cluttered and more manageable. There are 57 NH Covered Bridges, 118 VT covered bridges, 67 NH State Parks, 77 State Liquor Stores, 502 in the FJR Assist List, 1090 Lighthouses, 283 Yamaha Dealerships in Canada, and 1371 in the US, and, get this... 69,043 free WiFi locations in the US in my Custom POI files. And we are already up to 62 locations right now (and growing) in the NERDS RTE list. Can you imagine trying to keep all of that in your "Favorites?" No way!

Well, obviously I did not plot and create all of those custom POI files myself. I mean, I don't have much of a life, but plotting out 69 thousand free wi-fi locations is a bit bigger task than even I am up for. No, no... these files can be downloaded and saved (for free). Or, as in the case of the NERDS RTE list, you can create your own.

In the next post I'll tell you how to do both.

 

[FJReady]

Fred, did you get laid off or somethin? Jeepers how do you know all this stuff? Thanks in advance for any knowledge I'm able to retain from this excellent educational adventure.

 

[Fred W]

Nah, I just though that since we're making a new POI file for the NERDS RTEs that some folks might not know what to do with that file, or the FJR assistance list for that matter. It'll take me a while to get all the installments written.

 

[user 28803]

I'm looking forward to the how-to, Fred. I use extra POIs on mine but they're provided by another truck driver (rest areas, state scale locations, Walmarts and Sam's Clubs because that's who I work for, truck stops, etc.).

Thanks!

 

[Fontanaman]

+1 Fred. Thanks for sharing. I am looking forward to the next installments. I would like to get my hands on the FJR Dealers POI and learn how to manage Custom POI files.

On my last trip I used Find Fuel along my current route in remote locations like Utah. If more than 3 gas stations pop up in one city it is a sure bet to find gas in that city.

 

[Fred W]

The first thing you're going to need is the POI File. Like most software things related to these GPSes, it isn't all that straight forward. The file format that you would download, or create, for POI files is not what the GPS uses. POI files are generally either distributed in a .gpx file format (Generic gPs eXchange) as a series of waypoints . which is synonymous with "Favorites", or else as a simple .csv (Comma Separated Value) format such as a simple spreadsheet.

The simplest way to create your own Custom POI files is to use Mapsource or Basecamp to generate a series of Waypoints only (no routes, tracks or maps), and then save the file as a .gpx format file. Generally the larger POI files that you download will be in the .csv format, so you'll need to have a spreadsheet program to view or manipulate any of that data. I'll leave it up to the reader to figure out how to do that. Generally speaking you won't need to mess with the data in those big csv files all that much.


You can find some great pre-made custom POI files for download at the POI Factory web site. You have to join the site to download, but it's easy and completely free.


But neither the .csv nor the .gpx files can be uploaded directly to the GPS unit. They first have to be converted to a special .gpi (Gps Point of Interest) format and loaded onto the GPS. You do that with the free Garmin utility called POI Loader, available for download from the Garmin web site here.




Before you begin using POI Loader, you'll need to decide how you want to organize your custom POIs on your PC. As is generally true, there is an easy way, and there is a "better" way.

The easy way is to just drop all of the .csv and/or .gpx files into the same directory on your hard drive for the POI Loader utility to find them. The loader will crunch through all of the files and put them all into one big Custom POI file on your GPS. What's not easy about this is organizing and updating your Custom POI files later on, assuming that you will have more than one.


What I do is somewhat more time consuming, but better organized, IMO. On my PC's hard drive create subfolders for each of the .csv or .gpx files to reside in. Here you can see the directory structure on my drive. I have a POI directory, and then subdirectories for each of the POI files I have made or downloaded. The name you give the files is important as that is what it will be called on the GPS device's buttons. Also, if you decide that you'll want a custom icon for that list of POIs it must be a .bmp file and the filename must be identical to the POI filename. You'll also want the icon to be small (24x24 or smaller) so it doesn't monopolize your screen when it displays.

First step to actually loading the POI file is to hook up your GPS via USB cable. After it connects, if you browse the GPS directories in File Manager or My Computer, it should look something like this:

In my case, because I have a bunch of hard drives and CD/DVD drives in this box, the GPS maps out as H: and the SD card I have in teh GPS is I:. Your drive letters will probably be different. In the H:/Garmin directory is a subdirectory called Poi. If it isn't there already you can either create it, or it will automatically be created when you push some POIs to the GPS.



Now you would start the POI Loader utility. After it's installed, it should be in your Start menu under "Garmin." After the initial screen you'll get to this one. Select Garmin Device and then next.

On the next screen, after the program searches your devices, it should come up with your GPS listed as the default selection. If you pull down that device selection box you will also see any SD cards listed as possible destinations. These POI files are pretty small, so you might as well install them on the GPS itself unless you have some other reason not to.

Next select Install new POIs, then Next

And you'll come to this screen

You'll want to click on the "Browse" button and go find the directory on your hard drive that you put those .csv or .gpx files in. Here you can see I've found my FJR Assist directory. You only need to tell the program what directory the file(s) is in, not select the actual file.

So after clicking OK, you go back to the prior screen which should look something like this, with the path to your file(s) filled in:

When you click "Next" it goes through any file (or files) in that specified directory (and any subdirectories) and creates a single file named poi.gpi and sends that to the GPS's poi directory. Here's a look at the GPS Poi directory after the transfer.

[edit 5/19/16 - The latest version of POIloader.exe will automatically name the Custom POI file whatever the file name of the file that you are importing was (not poi.gpi anymore) so you no longer have to perform the following file renaming steps ]

Now here's the tricky part: If there was already a file on the GPS named poi.gpi it would have over-writen that file with the new one. So, if you are going to have multiple POI files on your GPS you will either need to process them all at the same time by selecting a directory that contains all of the .csv and .gpx files, or else just rename the file on the GPS to something else (meaningful) before loading the second POI file. Here I've given the file the same name on the GPS that it has on my PC, just to keep them straight

And here's a look at my GPS's poi directory after I've loaded up, and renamed, a bunch of them

The advantage to taking the extra steps to organize the files this way (both on my computer and on the GPS) is that, rather than just having one big poi.gpi file, I can selectively copy or delete any of these files individually as I need.



Now that we have them loaded I'll show you how to get at them on your GPS

 

[Fred W]

So you've got your POI files loaded onto the GPS, now how do you use them?

Well, if you use "Where To", then scroll to the second page, you should see an icon labelled "Extras"

And when you select that you'll get a menu that has "Custom POIs" as an option (you may have other "extras").

Selecting that should give you a list of all of the Custom POI lists that you've uploaded to your GPS. Here's mine:

Note that there are a couple more pages of Custom POI lists there.

You can use these custom POIs just like any other POI from the current mapset. You can press "Go", or do a "Save" and it will be in your Favorites. Or, when you are entering the "Where To" screen you can still select, "Near My Current Route, Near My Destination, or "In a Different City" and then access these custom POIs to sort them appropriately.

Here's the results when I said "Near" Cleveland Ohio and then went in the FJR Assist list:

But there are more features of these Custom POIs, that the regular ones don't have. As you are riding along down the road, just as long as you have your map scale at high enough res (most of us do) these Custom POIs will be shown on your GPS screen as you go by. (the ones n the mapset don't, as there are just way too many of them). And... if you've set a special and unique icon symbol, you'll know what kind of a custom POI you are rolling past. (Note that the default icon is a little silver ball that is not descriptive)

Here's a screen shot showing the map just a few miles away from here:

I can see that there are several free WiFi opportunities and a state Liquor store all in the immediate vicinity!

It is also possible to set "vicinity alerts" when you approach any of these Custom POIs, and your GPS can play a wav or mp3 file into your connected headset to alert you. That would be most useful for those folks that have to deal with Red Light Cameras, Photo Radar and the like. To figure that stuff out I recommend spending more time on the POI Factory web site's forums and learn what can be done.

So this is how you can configure your GPS to do more for you. Hope you find it useful. I know that this is pretty basic stuff for some of the old timer GPS users, but hey ... if nobody talks about it how would you know it's even there?

 

[bramfrank]

I can see that there are several free WiFi opportunities and a state Liquor store all in the immediate vicinity!

. . . . . making it a simple matter when travelling to know where to go to get a bottle of cheap hooch and then where to park the bike to get free Internet access to send nasty text messages and e-mails to your boss and post lewd pictures of yourself (possibly in demonstrative poses with a certain sheep doll?) on Facebook once you get wasted.

On a more serious note, many navigators have limited memory and maps have been getting larger and larger . . . . adding 100,000 new POIs can have impact on capacity - however you CAN stick your maps in a supplementary memory card - most navigators from Garmin support this feature.

Note that what Fred calls a 'vicinity alert' is properly called a 'Proximity POI'. They can be triggered based solely on the 'as the crow flies' distance to the point in question or they can be optionally tied to the speed at which the unit is moving. The best use for these speed related Proximity POIs is to warn users of upcoming 'speed cameras' and known locations for police radar traps. Many Garmin navigators come with red light camera files embedded, but it is a paid subscription service. If you become an active member of (or if you are impatient, make a donation to) POI-Factory you can get their latest speedcam and red light POI camera files for free.

That leads me to point out (in case it wasn't already obvious) that this thread applies only to Garmin navigators - TomTom and Magellan owners will need to actually go and look elsewhere on the Internet for this information.

 

[user 28803]

Very helpful. Thanks!

 

[painman]

Thanks for the info! I am techno challenged Fred and this will be very useful. I like to go to different gun shows and this will help in keeping updated where they might occur.

Also our CMA chapter could use your info when planning our group rides to keep a more orderly and safer ride. Thanks again, PM.

 

[RiderX]

Thanks Fred, very timely as I was previously using Favorites and that was a mess.

 

[BackRoadBob]

Fred,

Where did you find POI for "FJR assist "and "FJR dealers Canada and USA"

Thanks for a great writeup. I've been using Zumo 550 for years, but have not tapped into this feature.

 

[yamafitter]

I found the poi files for both the USA and the Canadian Yamaha dealers on the POI Factory website along with the yamaha bmp icon.

I would suspect that Fred has built up his own poi file of the FJR Assistance List.

 

[RossKean]

I found the poi files for both the USA and the Canadian Yamaha dealers on the POI Factory website along with the yamaha bmp icon.

I would suspect that Fred has built up his own poi file of the FJR Assistance List.

The FJR Assistance list is distributed with a POI file. Haven't loaded it but it is a GPX file - assume it works??

 

[RossKean]

Some time ago, I came across a neat website that includes tips and tricks for Garmin GPS.

Nuvi Tips

Thought it might be of interest. A lot of the stuff is pretty basic but it delves into some other stuff. May not be applicable to all the units out there but works for many.

Ross

 

[Fred W]

I found the poi files for both the USA and the Canadian Yamaha dealers on the POI Factory website along with the yamaha bmp icon.

The FJR Assistance list is distributed with a POI file. Haven't loaded it but it is a GPX file - assume it works??

Both of the above are spot-on.

You get the FJR Assistance list by joining the list. i.e. you have to be an assist-er to get the regularly updated list sent via email from Bungie (Steve) keeper of the list. More info on that here

The POI Factory web site has the Yamaha dealership (and several other marques) lists. As well as a whole bunch of other cool stuff.

Before anyone gets too carried away with all of these, as with most things in life, there is a limit!! I'm talking about how many POI lists you can (or should) have running at any one time, depending on which GPS you own and how you have it configured. You need to realize that all of the custom POIs will load into the GPS' RAM memory every time you turn it on. For that reason, in addition to loading all of your Maps onto a big SD card (instead of the internal GPS' memory) and you might want to selectively load very big POI files that you might not use very often onto your "backup" SD card as well, just swap the cards when you want to use them.

Y GPS MV

 

[FJRPittsburgh]

Fred,

Thanks for a very informative post young man. The POI's can be quite useful in many instances. Very much appreciated.

Jeff

 

[ArtJ1107]

Very timely post Fred. I'm just now getting around to installing the Zumo I bought from you. Sure is different than the Street Pilot I have now.

Thanks for the tips!

 

[Willie]

Very good thread !!. I have been using POI's for quite awhile. In addition to the reasons you have listed I have one file that alerts me to towns that begin with USA for the GLMC USA tour. Even though I know I am going to go thru it, a bell goes off when I get close to begin looking for a sign that I will need.

Thanks fof posting this great info

Willie