magellan meridian gold

[princeshoko]

Well the magellan meridian gold connects via com port, all my laptops and newer comps dont come with these ports.

 

Is there a magellan meridian gold to usb cable insted of the com cable?

 

Thanks

PrinceShoko

 

PS-- i love my magellan meridian gold and dont want a new system

[+gpsblake]

Nope, they don't make a Meridian that uses a USB. You can buy a serial to USB adapter, then you'll have to play around to get the right COM port to work and other issues. I read that many in here have made this work with the Meridians.

 

This topic has come up before, a little bit of searching in this forum might give you a better answer.

[+EScout]

You have two choices: an external USB to serial adapter, or an internal PCI card for desktops that has a serial port.

[+JohnnyVegas]

I have used the external adapter to load my Meridian gold with GSAK.

[+EScout]

Johnny is correct. That is your third option. You can load maps and waypoint files directly onto the card. You can take off the card, waypoint files, Tracks and routes.

[+traildad]

I also have a meridian gold. I needed a second serial port so I could hook up my Palm at the same time. I tried several USB to Serial adapters but could not get them to work. I got a PCI card for pretty cheap that added a serial port to the back of my computer. This works great and was easy.

 

You can put info into the Meridian via the SD card. I would only use that for maps. It takes a long time to transfer maps via the serial cable and you don't do it very often. I would not want to pull the SD card every time I wanted to upload or download waypoints or tracks. I have read that the battery contacts are easy to break. The more times you pull the batteries the bigger the chance something will get broken.

 

Check into getting a PCI card for your system. It is was the best way to go for me. If you want to try the USB adapter cable then buy it with a money back guarantee.

[+JohnnyVegas]

I would not want to pull the SD card every time I wanted to upload or download waypoints or tracks. I have read that the battery contacts are easy to break. The more times you pull the batteries the bigger the chance something will get broken.

 

I have pulled the SD card out of my Meridian a Dozens of times and I have not had a problem with the Battery contacts, I take out the batteries to replace them more than I take out the SD card.

[+traildad]

I have pulled the SD card out of my Meridian a Dozens of times and I have not had a problem with the Battery contacts, I take out the batteries to replace them more than I take out the SD card.

I also have pulled out my batteries to replace them more times than to use the SD card. The problems with Meridian battery terminals is well known. Here is a link to Yahoo groups for the Meridian. It is just one of many topics about this problem.

 

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Magellan_Mer...n/message/41600

 

I am always very careful removing the batteries and so far I have not had a problem.

[WillBowman]

I have pulled the SD card out of my Meridian a Dozens of times and I have not had a problem with the Battery contacts, I take out the batteries to replace them more than I take out the SD card.

I also have pulled out my batteries to replace them more times than to use the SD card. The problems with Meridian battery terminals is well known. Here is a link to Yahoo groups for the Meridian. It is just one of many topics about this problem.

 

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Magellan_Mer...n/message/41600

 

I am always very careful removing the batteries and so far I have not had a problem.

 

 

I use the 9pin serial to usb connector cable. the usb should automatically assign it a com port. I moved my pda off com 1 to a different com port.

[+madison_family]

Johnny is correct. That is your third option. You can load maps and waypoint files directly onto the card. You can take off the card, waypoint files, Tracks and routes.

 

How do you write the waypoint files directly to the card?

[+trainlove]

Johnny is correct. That is your third option. You can load maps and waypoint files directly onto the card. You can take off the card, waypoint files, Tracks and routes.

 

How do you write the waypoint files directly to the card?

 

In MapSend there is an option to export your waypoints. You can choose XLS and TXT. The Excel file is cool and useful for data manipulation, check out my photos for my 1 word log of the Massachusetts Delorme Challenge. The route I created to "draw" the grid lines was done in Excel.

I think the TXT version is stored in the Magellan propriatary NMEA format for waypoints, something like $PMGNWPT,4256.789,N,07112.345,W,,,,,,,*cb. Check the Yahoo Magellan Meridian user group for that.

 

Edited to add.

If you don't have MapSend then you are kind of limited when it comes to the SD card. I think that GSAK can Export to that format, I know that EasyGPS can't, I think that G7ToWin might be able to. You have to find, or write, a program that will be able to read the coordinates from a format you can get, i.e. LOC and GPX from geocaching.com and be able to write the NMEA format. That will include the need to calculate the correct checksums and so on. Writing this is no big deal. I have a short 20 line program that is not pretty at all but can do this in a limited fashion.

No don't ask for it, it's not something that I can give out.

Edited December 29, 2007 by trainlove

[+trainlove]

Johnny is correct. That is your third option. You can load maps and waypoint files directly onto the card. You can take off the card, waypoint files, Tracks and routes.

 

How do you write the waypoint files directly to the card?

 

One of the problems with cold weather, rock hard ground cover snow, and not caching and lots of forum posting is that messages as close as a few weeks ago are on page 4 or 5 back when doing a search.

 

To answer this question here goes.

A Magellan Gold will store & load waypoint/route files to & from the SD card. And it will store & load track files to and from the SD card.

 

To write a text file on a computer that you can put on the SD card you can use something as simple as the Notepad application in Windows. But you will need a program to calculate the NMEA checksum for each of the lines of data in your file, see below for snippet.

 

GSAK can write directly into Magellan SD format. It can also read in from a lot of popular formats. But you could write a program to read a format that GSAK/GPSBabel doesn't understand and output into a format that it does.

 

Waypoints are stored as:

$PMGNWPL,4234.567,N,07123.456,W,0000257,M,RANDOM,no place in particular,c*4D

notice it's decimal minutes with no degree symbol between the degrees and the whole minutes. I have not done an experiment in putting a coord with 4 digits after the decimal point on a GPS and see if it's a little bit more precise than this internal stored format. Perhaps it will get rounded in the GPS.

 

By the way, tracks are as follows:

$PMGNTRK,4352.061,N,07918.473,W,00116,M,173949.42,A,,020602*67

 

Um, those are not the checksums for those propriatary Magellan NMEA words, duh.

 

googled from the internet, no source given so no props. Is standard simple code anyway.

Public Function NMEA_Checksum(sentence$) As String
 Dim i&, sum&
 'The "sentence" is from position 1 (the $) to the "*"
 'The checksum calc does NOT include the $ or *
 For i = 2 To Len(sentence) - 1
   sum = sum Xor Asc(Mid$(sentence, i, 1))
 Next i
 NMEA_Checksum = Right$("0" & Hex$(sum), 2)
 'The returned value is a 2 character string containing the check sum value
End Function

 

As a programmer I would use Instr(sentence,"$")+1 instead of 2 in the For loop.

And Instr(sentence,"*")-1. But I think that an * can be part of a waypoint note on Magellans so this is not necessarily valid.

Edited January 7, 2008 by trainlove