Frank's Blog

I went to Egypt for roundabout one week, of course, not just to try out my Garmin Dakota 20 but it was a good possibility to see how it works and helps.
First step, prepare the device with map(s) and waypoints about Egypt.
There are no commercial maps about Egypt so I went to GPS MapSearch, found some maps, downloaded them and load them on the Dakota directly via drag’n drop in the Finder (did I mentioned already that I use Mac ?). The Garmin software don’t accept these free maps, so I had to go this way.
Next step, place some points of interests (POI). I went to GPS Waypoints chose the country and downloaded the file (*.gpx, xml format). I started the Garmin POI Loader but it expects some other format and didn’t let me choose the downloaded file. I switched to the Basecamp and there I was able to import the file and upload the data to the device.
So, what’s the POI Loader for ?

I dunno right know, need some time to investigate the Gamin apps.

Anyway, I had some rudimentary maps and some waypoints on the Dakota. With this I went to Egypt. Whenever I was outside I switched it on to let it track my ways.
First I let it run without organizing much, therefore the track contained up to 3 days. Not the best, I thought and change the usage to save every day seperately to not get confused by all the waypoints/tracks.
It was quite helpful for various situations:

Check if the taxi driver takes a reasonable route.

When docking with the ship in Luxor, the Dakota told me we were 10 km before Luxor. First I though about a malfunction/error but it was right. The taxi brought us to Luxor and also back later. If we hadn’t booked the same taxi to go back, how could we have explained were to go ? There was no address of these piers outside the city.

In Cairo we were “exploring” downtown by going through the streets which seemed interesting. After some time we wanted to take the same way to a famous bazar as the day before. With the Garmin it was easy to view the track from the day before and find it.

Overall it worked very well and helped a lot during vacations although I didn’t use routable maps or know all tricks/functions of the device right now.

After coming back I loaded the tracking data from the device to the Basecamp. As there isn’t any official Garmin map about Egypt the tracks aren’t good to view in there. But there is Google Earth and the Basecamp has a function “View in Google Earth” which I used to have it more visual. Another way is to open the track data directly in Google Earth.
All tracks in Egypt:

A detailled view, visiting the island Philae:

Also I tried to unite the GPS coordinates and the photos. I used the application GPSPhotoLinker. Alhough the software has a function to load tracks directly from a gps device it failed with an error of GPSBabel.
Never mind, it’s also possible to get the data manually via filesystem and choose them via “Load Tracks”.
After that I loaded the photo folder and did the tagging by hitting “Batch save to photos” from the “Auto” tab. The result was that ca. 50 photos from 830 have no coordinates, reasonable as I’m not having tracks from every single minute e. g. inside the ship.
Now I imported the tagged photos to iPhoto. I checked the locations of some, but didn’t see always the expected places. Maybe it’s because of I don’t know how every area in Egypt is called, maybe there are errors in my tagging process.
Another thing to investigate another day, for the moment I’m satisfied with the overall result of my new toy.