At the boat show we visited the Garmin stand with the intention to purchase a PC interface cable for my hand held Garmin GPS 72. After a very brief conversation with the people on the stand it became apparent that they did not have any interface leads.
One of the Garmin reps gave me his business card and said send him an email and he would post one out to me free of charge (Yeah right), today the cable arrived in the post and good to his word, it was free. Excellent service!
The main reason for this is to use the PC/GPS in conjunction with Google Earth.
Download the latest version from google, pay for the upgrade 20 US dollars per year, which will then interface to a GPS, Garmin or Magellan - I recommend Garmin, most of you will already know were this is going…
Once installed on the PC, go to the menu at the top of the screen and select Tools, go to the bottom of the menu Options. On selecting Options. Go to the tab, which says Cache.
Increase the Disk Cache Size to 2000 MB, maximum size.
Locate your home port on google earth and zoom into the area as close as you can get, then start to pan around your chosen cruising area, again zooming in to the maximum resolution, try adding place markers as you go and make a route.
Unplug PC from the internet and take on board the boat, fire up google earth on the PC with GPS attached, yes I know its not connected to the internet, you will see a warning from google earth, read the warning, smile, and select the No button to continue.
It's brilliant and works a treat, this is going to be a great way to visualise our progress and add pictures to our blog. We will be using the usual Admiralty paper charts for plotting our route and will have a chart plotter as a back-up.
This has to be the best 10 quid I have ever spent and I hope others find this useful.
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