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Home Animals Desert Map Photography What's New?

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Day Trips

Garmin Topo Tracks

Downloads, Installation

On a lot of our Day Trips you'll see Garmin Topo Tracks available. See the capture to the right. You can click on this and a box like the one shown below will open giving you a choice of either opeing (not what you want to do) or saving it to a place in your computer. Saving it is the right choice and if your going to save more than one you might want to make a folder called Garmin Topo Tracks or in this case Garmin Maps to keep them orgainized. They are already named for each specific area. This one is named crystalhill, so you'll know what it is.

Your going to click on Save to save the crystalhill.mps file to your computer. Unless you have Garmin Software on your computer, you won't be able to open this file because your computer doesn't know what a .mps file format is. More on the software later.

In the window below you'll see I've created a My Documents folder called Garmin Maps. Create your own folder and name it anything you want, just so you remember what you named it. This is what you going to open and where your going to save the file.

This window will tell you the download is complete and you've saved the file named crystalhill.mps. If this window does not close automatically, click Close to exit.

Now to access the .mps file you just saved you have to have one of Garmin's Map Source topo programs on your computer. You can purchase the program on their site or even Walmart has them at times. Once you open the Map Source program you'll go to File and in the dropdown click on Open. See the window below.

Here's your .mps file for crystalhill. Select the file by clicking on it and then click open and it will open in the Garmin Map Source Program. Easy. After you do this you'll see the Active Log file in the Tracks tab. Click on Tracks tab if it's not already open (in the larger blue circle). In the smaller blue circle in the top of the program window you'll see the name, telling you you've opened the right file.

Now to see the track you've downloaded, and this is the easiest way, right click on the Active Log file and in the drop down box you'll left click on Show Selected Track on the Map. See below.

Okay here's the track you just downloaded from the site. It's the dotted yellow line on the topo map. You'll also notice there are Waypoints with the track to show various points of interest. In this case one of them shows the location of the turn off to the Narrows in Un-named Wash.

We're almost there. Now that you have the track loaded into the program your ready to put it into your Garmin GPS. Your GPS has to be hooked up to your computer via a USB cable and has to be turned on. Then just click the Send to the Device shown here to load it onto the GPS.

This window will open and the first time you do this you may have to click on Find Device to browse through the computer to the USB and click on the GPS. After the first time you won't have to do this again, the program will find it on it's own. Don't foget to connect the GPS to the computer and turn it ON. Within a couple of seconds it will have it loaded on the GPS and your done. That's easy!

Now for those that like to play with software, here's something that took a while to figure out, and I'll pass it along. When your in the Garmin software the one thing it won't do is load more than one topo track at a time, but maybe you want to look at two of them that are in the same area. Here's a trick to accomplish that. Open up your program and bring the one topo track up from your computer. Then open another instance of the Garmin Topo program so you have two programs running on the computer at once. Now open the other topo track on the second Garmin program. With it active right click the Active Log and click Copy. Now click on the original program to make it active and right click in the Tracks area, then click Paste, and itll paste the second track into the original program. Play with it and try it.