Jared Evans Global Microbrand

Before I go into unfamiliar territory, such as my recent road trip to the state of Vermont, I usually arm my Garmin GPS unit with the waypoints of recommended places for a visit or sightseeing.  It’s a snap to find these destinations from my location by selecting the waypoint and leaving it up to the GPS unit calculate the route to drive.

My favorite way to find and save interesting waypoints is via Google Maps “My Maps” feature which is available to those who login with a Google account.  While it’s easy to select and save waypoints on a Google Maps, it was important to be able to transfer all the waypoints to my GPS unit with least pain as possible.  It would be a nice bonus if I was able to transfer all the waypoints in one fell swoop with no further data re-entry work.

Nav2US
I tested the www.nav2us.com (still in beta) Google map add-on.  While I was able to transfer the waypoints to my GPS unit, I had to click on each waypoint and name them all again before the transfer could take place.  This was time consuming because I had to basically re-enter the data, which I wanted to avoid in the first place.  There’s the downside of being at the mercy of nav2us website being up and operational.  If the site is down for any reason, I would be unable to transfer the waypoints.

Garmin Communicator Plugin
Another suggested method was to download and install the Garmin Communicator Plugin and from directly within Google Maps, use the “Send to GPS” link to transfer the waypoints.  Unfortunately, the plugin didn’t work with my Garmin 60cs GPSMap unit.  This method seems to suffer the same flaw as the nav2us add-on by allowing you to only transfer one waypoint at a time, but I am unable to verify at this time, so I could be wrong.

EasyGPS and GPSBabel
After further research, I ran across the perfect method of a single batch transfer of all waypoints of a Google Map with no data re-entry work necessary.  Two software packages are required to accomplish this:  EasyGPS and GPSBabel.

In order to be able to transfer all waypoints of a Google Map:

1) After setting all the waypoints on a Google Map, output it into the Google Map format (kml)
2) Use GPSBabel to convert the KML file into the EasyGPS format (loc)
3) Load the loc file into EasyGPS and transfer all the waypoints to the GPS unit.

For example, here’s my personalized Google Map for the Vermont trip:

To get the KML output from this map,

1) Click on the “Link” link in the upper-right corner of the map.
2) Copy the link
3) Paste the link into the browser and add “&output=kml” (without the double quotes) at the end of the link
4) You should see an automatic pop-up that asks if you want to download the kml file.
5) Save this kml on your desktop

Fire up GPSBabelGUI.exe and do the file format conversion from KML to LOC:

Click the “Let’s Go” button to complete the file conversion.

Start EasyGPS and load the LOC file that was created in previous step.  Transfer all the waypoints at once to your GPS unit!

Side note for some GPS users: Usually before transferring the waypoints, you may have to rename the waypoints within EasyGPS so the names are only up to 10 characters long (a limitation of some GPS units).

Now you’re ready for your trip!