Getting a route onto a Garmin Forerunner 305

[beige_alert]

(This is another technical tutorial intended less for the friends list and more for the confused users out there googling for help)

The Forerunner is more ultra-fancy pedometer than navigation system, but since it runs by GPS, it can perform amazing feats of navigation too, limited by a UI intended more for athletic training than navigation and, of course, the tiny screen needed to fit on the wrist.

It is possible to define a route and upload it to the Forerunner, and let it tell you which way to go and when a turn is coming up using the Navigation/Route mode.

You can define a path in Google Earth, using Add Path and clicking out a series of waypoints. Once done, right-click on the path in the "places" list and select "save place as" and save it in kml form. Now the trick is converting that into something the Forerunner will accept as a route.


gpsbabel -i kml -f YourRoute.kml -x transform,rte=trk,del -r -o garmin -F usb:


This will transform the trackpoints into routepoints and upload them as a route. You do seem to lose the name of the route in the process. It does, at least, seem to work.

Comments

Garmin Forerunner 305 location limit

[(Anonymous)]

Many thanks for the solution to uploading Google Earth routes to the Garmin Forerunner 305. Unfortunately I've discovered that there appears to be a (hard?) limit of 100 locations (shared between all routes) and this is easily exceeded by even a modestly detailed route. At least the unit is sensible enough to warn you with a "Route truncated" message when it fails to load all of the required locations.

Garmin Upload

[(Anonymous)]

Can you please explain to me how to convert the path into the Garmin software? I do not understand how to use the line of code that you have provided.

Thanks

Re: Garmin Upload

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

I don't know anything about Garmin's software, it doesn't run on Linux. GPSBabel is available for Macintosh and Windows, though.

Route simplification

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for the useful information on uploading routes into the Garmin Forerunner, it's much appreciated.

The routes I manually create in Google Earth and those I record on the Forerunner often exceed the curiously low 100 point limit for routepoints. I've found that the easiest way to simplify them is to use the following option in gpsbabel:

-x simplify,count=95

Here I limit the route to 95 points to give me the option to save a few interesting points as I follow the route without having to delete existing ones.

The option seems to do a pretty good job but in order to check I also save the simplified route as a KML file so I can compare the two in Google Earth:

-o kml,points=0 -F test_simplify.kml

Note that I specify that there are no placemarks as this tends to clutter the display.

Thus an example full usage is:

gpsbabel -i kml -f test.kml -x transform,rte=trk,del -x simplify,count=95 -o kml,points=0 -F test_simplify.kml -r -o garmin -F usb:

Hope you find this useful
Simon

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