 Manufacturers such as Garmin give users the ability to load their own Points of Interest such as; Red light camers, speed traps, restaurants, retail shops and more into your GPS Navigator. You can set your GPS to behave differently when it approaches these manually loaded points. For example, have your GPS unit warn you with a Tone when you approach a red light camera or pass a speed trap, over a certain speed. Keep reading to find out how to get the points into your Garmin GPS. To load your own points into the Garmin GPS, you will need to first download the Garmin POI Loader GPS utility, from Garmin's support site. Once you have the software to load your GPS you will need to find or create the Points of Interest for the GPS. There are thousands of sites that will allow you to download points in various formats for your GPS. The two most popular file formats are CSV and GPX. CSV is a comma deliminated file and the GPX is based on the XML standards. If you are creating your own file CSV will be the easiest because it can be done using a simple text editor or spreadsheet program. We will talk about the format in a future article. When you download the points you will want to save all the files in one main folder. You need to do this so that each time you load new points your older points you want get load again. Each time you send new data the old is deleted and replaced. So now that we have POI Loader from Garmin and some POI files from the internet we need to load them. Hook your GPS to your computer and start up Garmin POI Loader. Once the program sees you GPS you can move onto the next step in the program and select the folder that contains all your GPS POI data. The program is going to ask you for your preferences for each file. It will ask you if you want to be warned when close to the POI and what should be the trigger. You can have the unit f you are approaching the point over a given speed or when you get within a pre-set distance. You can also have the GPS do nothing at all when you are near a point. You can use the external points you loaded for navigation. Here is short list of types of points yo may want to load in your GPS; Redlight Cameras, Speed Traps, Customer Locations, Favorite restuarant chain, School zones, retail stores, GPS City locations, mountain peak names and more.
GPS is a very usefull tool once you learn all the little neat tricks you can do. At GPS City we want to help you learn these smart uses of GPS.
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