Autorouting in the GPSr with Garmin Metroguide

It is often said that MG will autoroute on the PC but not in the GPSr. This is not necessarily correct, assuming you have an autorouting GPSr. Why do I care about this? Because I own MGNA8, and not CN/CS.

You can autoroute with non-v4 MetroGuide with varying degrees of success/ease using 3rd party utils to load your Garmin maptiles. Pick your poison from the options below.
You can autoroute with MetroGuide USA v4.x out of the box, but that is not what this page is about. If you have v4 you likely got it on purpose for this reason (goes for about $50 on eBay).

Method 1 - autorouting, somewhat busted indexing

Autoroutes like a champ. Some Find indexing is limited because no .MDR is generated, but the maps are perfect. POIs do show up with "nearest" search, but name searches do not always work. "Find containing" seems to work. More details as I test further. I don't do much address/POI finding so it will take me a while to find the limitations.

In this method MapSource is used only to select maptiles. If you already know what maptiles you want you can skip straight to the sendmap20 step below.

MapSource
1. select your maps in MapSource
2. save as example.gdb or whatever.
img2gps
1. open the example.gdb file you saved in the previous step.
2. Select All the maptiles it finds.
3. Save. It will want to use something like example.i2g, but type in example.txt instead.
sendmap20, also bundled with img2gps above.
1. Hit Add Maps and load the example.txt file from the previous step.
2. send the maps to your GPS or create an .IMG file for later consumption/archiving/whatever.
3. enjoy. :-)

Method 2 - the MapSource Index Dance - autorouting, good indexing

This method is documented in this post on map_authors.

Method 3 - GeoDude's Autorouting Metroguide Wizard - autorouting, good indexing

There is a tool designed to automate the Method 2 index dance. Might or might not work for you. Didn't work for me.

Method 4 - separate map and index generation - "saibal's method"

This method is documented on this thread at Brighthand. Look where it says

3-Autorouting and Indexing for GPSMap 60CS and 60CSx.

Method 5 - binary editing MetroGuide
...either by hand or with GeoDude's Gold tool.  I have not listed this option previously because I am conflicted about this approach, but I am starting to get email saying it's missing from the list.  The main advantage is that you can use MapSource directly with no tricks. 


$Id: MGautorouting.orb,v 1.3 2010/08/28 14:47:42 mouse Exp $







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