Sunday, March 18, 2012

Hacking eXplorist 100, 200 and 300 GPS Receivers

PC-Mobile.net, a popular aftermarket supplier of GPS cables, has a product that may bring joy to many Magellan owners. It’s a PC interface cable for the eXplorist 100, 200 and 300 units. These GPS receivers don’t come with this capability, nor can you buy such a cable from Magellan. The only options I know of are this aftermarket unit or a do-it-yourself hack.

About Rich Owings

Rich is the owner, editor and chief bottle-washer for GPS Tracklog. Connect with him on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus.

Comments

  1. Hank Roberts says:

    I bought one of these cables figuring it’d be worth the risk to try to connect the eXplorist 300 to the Powerbook (G3, OSX 10.3.9). Though the website just assured some software was needed, with a link to a Russian/English site that actually didn’t have either softwrae or advice, just another “ought to work”
    GPSy says they’re just starting to try to support the eXplorist. Doesn’t see the device.
    Didn’t work yet. I’ve now found several other scattered reports a year old of people trying this, saying the About finds the device under USB.
    One person posted second hand having heard that someone had gotten GPSBabel+ to transfer data to a Mac (no idea what OS level) (I think one of its developers) to work. I haven’t found anytying describing how yet.
    Pointers welcome.

  2. Hank Roberts says:

    Okay, there’s a driver at Prolific. Getting hopeful. PL2303_1.2.1.pkg

  3. Hank Roberts says:

    Hang on, I found a driver from March 2007 at Prolific:
    PL2303_1.2.1.pkg

  4. Hank,
    Please let us know if it works.

  5. Marc E. Mosher says:

    You guys need to enable the interface, otherwise the cable won’t help you. See this thread – http://forums.groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=121370

  6. Thanks for the tip Marc.

  7. I also have a explorist100, and purchased the cable from pc-mobile net.
    It actually worked well, and definitely makes the explorist100 more useful.
    Yet, I also found the software/info on the Russian/English site limited, (http://rhamphorinkx.newmail.ru).
    So I ended up writing my own software to download/upload data. Over the years, I have been gradually adding capabillity to the software.
    For those interested, take a look at the software.
    http://132.234.129.50/Downloads/Explorer.html
    (It is free, no time limits, no nag-ware etc).
    Charles Hacker.

    • Charles,
      Any chance of using your software?
      I followed the link but it requires a password.

      thanks

  8. Excellent! Thanks for posting the link.

  9. can someone update this? i just obtained an explorist 300 data cable to hook it up to my pc, yet i can’t find any good links and the one on the russian site says i’m forbidden. Help me please?

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