Sunday, April 21, 2013

CDT Prep: 4-21-13 GPS Done!

My GPS is loaded up and ready to go! Man, what a chore! After three consecutive weekends being stuck in front of the computer for a majority of my Saturdays and Sundays, I am relieved to say that it's all done. In theory, it should not be too difficult to program the thing, but it seemed like I was running into issue after issue, trying to problem solve my way out of it, checking, double checking, triple checking, quadruple checking, on and on, and on. Felt like I was going to lose my mind yesterday. But it's all done now. Here's the set up I settled on for my Garmin Etrex 30:

-Northwest Topos for the state of Montana.
-GPS File Depot for topos of Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.
-I decided to load Bear Creek Waypoints into 5 separate 8 GB micro SD cards. I had to use 2 SD cards for the state of Montana because the Garmin Etrex only holds 2000 waypoints at a time. Many folks opt to use "Points of Interest" (POI's) instead of Waypoints because the GPS can hold the entire trails worth without having to swap out SD cards. I didn't want to cut any corners since this is my first time using a GPS. Only time on the trail will tell whether or not using separate SD cards with waypoints was a wiser decision than POI's.
-I loaded Star Man's Tracks onto the individual SD cards to use for alternate routes.
-I loaded Jonathan Ley's compass rose waypoints onto the individual cards as well. For the state of Colorado, I had to delete 18 waypoints to make room for Ley compass rose waypoints because I exceeded the 2000 waypoint limit by 18 and the compass rose seemed like something I didn't want to go without.
-At the moment, I feel good about the setup.

No comments:

Post a Comment