Navman POI files?

[9D280]

Picked up one of this lot's car units for not a lot of money in a supermarket last week, and having had it on the screen for a few days, it would appear the POI database is, well, how do I put this? somewhat out of date! I passed the site of a petrol station shown on the unit which I know closed about 8 years ago...

No problem thinks I, I got a POI cruncher that talks to everything, use a couple of POI sites to grab the latest databases, and job done. Then I discover it won't aknowledge any POI files on my GPS. So I treat the GPS as a USB mass storage device, and find the POI files in the GPS have a ".map" extension.

Now, Both my waypoint / POI grinders have Navman's save option as a CSV file, which I can save & open in Excel. Is this a simple case of "save as" followed by a rename, or is the "in GPS" file a special format?

[Poly]

Originally Posted by 9D280

Picked up one of this lot's car units for not a lot of money in a supermarket last week, and having had it on the screen for a few days, it would appear the POI database is, well, how do I put this? somewhat out of date! I passed the site of a petrol station shown on the unit which I know closed about 8 years ago...

No problem thinks I, I got a POI cruncher that talks to everything, use a couple of POI sites to grab the latest databases, and job done. Then I discover it won't aknowledge any POI files on my GPS. So I treat the GPS as a USB mass storage device, and find the POI files in the GPS have a ".map" extension.

Now, Both my waypoint / POI grinders have Navman's save option as a CSV file, which I can save & open in Excel. Is this a simple case of "save as" followed by a rename, or is the "in GPS" file a special format?

If you copy a POI file from the device to the PC (don't try to change it on the device in case it buggers anything up) and then rename .map to *.csv can you open it? (actually you don't even need to rename it if you tell excel the right things, or just check it is comma separated values)

[chris123]

PocketGPS is a good website for all things GPS:

http://www.pocketgpsworld.com

From a quick scan, it looks like you need Navman's SmartST Desktop software to convert POI files to the require format?

Cheers

Chris

[9D280]

Chris,

There lies half the problem - unless I am being really stoopid, I can't find a "buy" for the Navdesk software on their site. Having trawled a couple of GPS forums, it would appear that trying to buy a copy isn't the easiest thing to do either online or by phone

Pol,

Yeah, I have copied onto the PC, but due to a combination of small toddling things & more important projects (like rebuilding a Clamshell!) I haven't had a chance to muck about with it. I kind of hoped someone might have found out already & if it wasn't a cunningly disguised CSV, saved a bit of faffing time on the PC. It certainly doresn't open easily in anything. Thing that puzzled me most was I thought the ".map" files were exactly that - maps! I can only assume the Machine uses the location (directory) to work out what it's looking at.