Sunday, March 18, 2012

This week in GPS — August 10th, 2013

Garmin Vector pedal-based power meters

This week in GPS is a weekly link roundup of (mostly) GPS related odds and ends, from GPS Tracklog and other places around the Web. To get a few of the biggest stories as they break, follow me on Twitter. This week’s lead image is of the Garmin Vector bike pedal-based power meters, which are finally hitting the market.

From GPS Tracklog

Our posts from the past week:

Drones

Garmin

Just wanted to let you know I have found a tool that every Mapsource and Basecamp user needs to have. As you no doubt know, Garmin’s map product installers are a nightmare to use. There is no consistency in them: depending on the vintage of the product, some of them are hard coded to install the maps in specific places like C:\Garmin, and give you no option to change the install location, while others default to whichever drive has the most free space, but allow you to select another location. Then there are those EVIL maps that give you a dialog box to select the location you want, then IGNORE your choice and proceed to install the ma somewhere else anyway! City Navigator North America is one of these.  So, you can easily end up with Garmin maps scattered all over the place, not only in different folders, but even on different drives.

I was searching the ‘net for possible solutions to this annoyance and found a utility program called “JaVaWa GMTK“. It does several functions, including backup and restore of mapsets and unlock codes, but the one I am most pleased with is that it can easily and quickly move entire map installs.  When you run the program, it scans the registry for all installed Garmin maps, then you select each map product that got installed to a folder where you didn’t want it, and select the path where you want it moved to.  Press the “go” button, and GMTK moves the entire batch of maps, and corrects all the pertinent registry entries so that Mapsource sees the map product in it’s new location. GMTK moved City Nav NA, Topo 24K National Parks West, and Topo Canada successfully and as far as I can tell, made all the registry corrections properly: Mapsource was able to see all of the relocated maps no problem.  It handles both the older IMG format maps and the newer GMP maps.

For years I have been struggling with moving Garmin’s improperly installed mapsets and correcting registry entries manually, every time I have to do a Windows re-install after a crash or when buying a new hard disk. Now I’ll never have to go through that again.

DeLorme

TomTom

Updates

Geocaching

We’re jammin’

GPS tracking

Going mobile

GPS in the news

The business of GPS

Just geo

Miscellany

2 dimension road map, may (sic) source is Atlas and Navteq. TOPO map is STRM3.

Updated GPS reviews

I’ve updated these review and resource pages with the following links:

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. +1 for GaVaWa GMTK! I have been using it for a year or two, and absolutely LOVE IT! It makes keeping the maps organized a “normal process”. It is also extremely handy if you use MapSource and/or BaseCamp on multiple computers (my home laptop and travel tablet), because you can easily distribute the maps over the computers after a single download.

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