How to load map / course on garmin forerunner 305 and others

[Opendro]

I have the garmin forerunner 305 and I have plans to upgrade. I have even bought a spare battery just in case the current battery dies off.

Though I use it mostly for running just to get an idea of the distance, my most desperate need comes when I need to load a course. I did load a course when I did the Kotai 200K express. I followed some instruction and garmin connect website had classic mode enabled that time. It was not difficult.

Lately, without the classic mode, I just couldn't find a way to do it. The modern UI does not have anything yet under the training section, which is what garmin 305 uses for map course. I also did load a route (not just 100 waypoints, but many more). I cannot figure that out as well.

You might think, the obvious other option would be to upload a .tcx or .gpx file as activity and then convert the activity to course. But connect.garmin just fails to process the courses (.tcx) and gpx tracks. They fail with some error unless the tcx was directly from a garmin log itself. So, it is of no use unless garmin fix these issues.

Cut short... what is the way now?

This is what I followed.

1. Convert to a .tcx (from various formats) using http://www.gpsies.com/convert.do
   
2. Download garmin training center from http://garmin-training-center.soft32.com/free-download/ or directly from http://files.freetrialdownload.com/40/393280/845049/TrainingCenter_365.exe. If you go to garmin site and click at the training center link http://www8.garmin.com/products/trainingcenter/ you will be disappointed, because that link redirects to mapsource which is almost like training center, can do many things like route creation, etc. But has the same issue of being enable to send course to device. So, use the earlier link.
3. I also had trouble in detecting garmin device in spite of having windows 7 with all latest patches. Then I had to install garmin USB driver : http://www8.garmin.com/support/download_details.jsp?id=591 With that, the device was detected irrespective of whether it is on or off. You might have to try similar ant driver for other devices that don't have USB port for charging, such as 310XT.
4. Once in training center, you can receive activities, tracks, courses, etc. from device and convert any activity log into course. Or import from user account -> courses... to open and import the .tcx file created using step 1.
5. This will create a folder under the Imported Courses. Please note that the .tcx file could be activities log. If you open the tcx file and look for activities keyword. If it is found, it is an activity log. If you find courses keyword, it is a course. You need to choose the import type correctly.
6. Using toolbar, send to device. Wait till the device says transfer complete. Then go to training, courses and you will find the course.
7. Make sure that the device settings -> General -> Map has Show Map as Yes, User Location as Show and orientation as Track up so that you will get to know your direction of movement and thus can anticipate and decide turns accurately.

Note that older devices like mine accepts about 13K trackpoints in the course. Newer devices like 310xt accepts more than 40K trackpoints (from what I have tried) and it can thus accommodate a course as far as 10,000 km if the roads are normal, not too much unpredictable turns every 10 meters.

Enjoy navigating through your watches :)

[Prashanth Chengi]

Open, you could try using a LiveCD of a mainstream Linux distro such as Debian or Ubuntu. You won't need any special drivers; Linux should be able to detect your watch as a storage device. Navigate to the folder called 'New Files' and copy your tcx files there. Unmount and restart the watch and you should have the course loaded up. I've never used Garmin connect and this is all that I did with my Edge 200 earlier, and with my Edge 500, now.

/Prashanth

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[O p e n d r o]

Wow. I will try that. Thanks.

[Opendro]

I tried this method in 920xt where I could see the mounted drive. A tcx for a 7000 km had about 38k trackpoints and resulted in 14MB file. This was not able to fit into the watch memory. But if I use the training center to import the tcx file, it fit in the entire thing and didn't copy the .tcx file directly.

So, directly copy does not work.

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[Prashanth Chengi]

Open,  please try to research whether your watch can be expected to behave normally,  on such a long ride, and not crash with strange aftereffects. My Edge 200 was once near full, and while on a ride in the UK ,  it shut down unexpectedly,  and what was more shocking was that it had wiped the track! I just happened to have, by sheer luck, my laptop, data cable and the required course on my laptop,  so I was able to copy the track again and move on. If not, I'd have been in some trouble.

/Prashanth

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[Karthick Gururaj]

Hi Open,

You earlier said:

You might think, the obvious other option would be to upload a .tcx or .gpx file as activity and then convert the activity to course. But connect.garmin just fails to process the courses (.tcx) and gpx tracks. They fail with some error unless the tcx was directly from a garmin log itself. So, it is of no use unless garmin fix these issues.

Maybe worth checking the format difference between the tcx file you are uploading and the one downloaded from garmin. You probably know that tcx is just a simple text file with markup for providing lat/long and the times. Maybe a simple difference in the two versions is preventing upload - you maybe able to fix it easily.

- Karthick

[Opendro]

I'm aware of the two .tcx files - one for activity and another for course. They have different tags, but trackpoints are similar.

But what I see is that the device (at least 920xt) does not store the course as text .tcx file. I used training center finally and when the .tcx is uploaded to the device, it creates a .FIT file (which is the extension for so many other things). And the space it takes in the device is much smaller than the .tcx (may be a tenth). If I think about it, it makes sense to store the coordinates as binaries, not as text. A full coordinate x or y will probably fit in two bytes whereas the text equivalent can take upto 10+ bytes (one byte for each decimal digit). And then think of the unwanted spaces, etc.

[Prashanth Chengi]

Open, the garmin indeed converts tcx files to its native fit files, but I think what Karthick was trying to say was that if you can manually modify the tcx files to what garmin is happy with, it should then ingest it and do the internal conversion to fit without any trouble. 

/Prashanth