After a minimum of investigation, I have purchased the paid version of GPS Utility to convert my marks to the new machine's format. Looking at the help topics, it seems that all I had to do was import them into the program, then go Save As in gpx format, and I am done. Is it that easy? Ready to transfer to a micro Sd and plug them in?"squints suspiciously at resultant files"
Sounds about right. Sometimes the files can be a bit glitchy depending on your unit - as an example my GP7000 won't accept the file on a SD card but will quite happily accept the data via a serial cable hook up. Can't comment specifically on Raymarine though.
I set up and networked the new gear on the bench as the boat isn't here yet. The marks uploaded from the card no problems and displayed. I them realised that I hadn't really done a very good job of it, as I has ignored warnings about incompatible symbols, and they had all loaded as red crosses.
Since my original post, my ambitions have expanded, and I realised (thought) I could get all my old professional marks in. Upon uploading from the last C Plot backup, found I had some 28, 164... Axiom will only accept a max of 10,000. So I've had an interesting week of playing with it, using the correct symbol sets, merging, and editing into likely areas which will be useable with a pleasure boat. There are some areas no-one will ever visit in a pleasure boat off here--I don't care how far offshore you run over there to get to the reef, you won't be going over 50 nm miles offshore to get to the shelf here on the upper west coast.
During all this, I discovered that, according to the manual, the Axiom will only support 15 tracks , but of up to 10,000 points each? I like to manage my tracks, I'm not one of those who just turn it on at the ramp to have it run all day. If I want to keep a specific track, looks like I'll have to convert it to a route, which looks easy, and it will support up to 250 routes. So I've deleted all my stored tracks off the converted marks, I just had too many.
True, Tracks are often for short term stuff. if you were to save every day out it would be a nightmare!
Moose
I had similar issue with capacity and just ended up fitting a Micro tower PC with a solid state hard drive, 10 inch monitor, inverter, waterproof industrial panel mouse and USB GPS. It also gives me real time engine diagnostics via Evinrude software and the plotting software I run can be made work with google earth images or any other scanned/geo referenced image.Originally Posted by ranmar850
I set up and networked the new gear on the bench as the boat isn't here yet. The marks uploaded from the card no problems and displayed. I them realised that I hadn't really done a very good job of it, as I has ignored warnings about incompatible symbols, and they had all loaded as red crosses.
Since my original post, my ambitions have expanded, and I realised (thought) I could get all my old professional marks in. Upon uploading from the last C Plot backup, found I had some 28, 164.
During all this, I discovered that, according to the manual, the Axiom will only support 15 tracks , but of up to 10,000 points each? I like to manage my tracks, I'm not one of those who just turn it on at the ramp to have it run all day. If I want to keep a specific track, looks like I'll have to convert it to a route, which looks easy, and it will support up to 250 routes. So I've deleted all my stored tracks off the converted marks, I just had too many.
I mostly saved tracks as navigation aids. Run through a reefy area on a nice day,with the sun well up and, if your track was good, save it to a particular colour, and never delete that colour. But there was nothing saved that I can't do again, and I will save them as new routes in the Axiom.
I had a full PC-based system on my commercial boats, known as C Plot. This is what my saved marks came from.And also a lot of saved track, which was really irrelevant anyway, old crayfishing pot lines. The ones from the Lowrance were the saved nav tracks. Being able to have them all in one big file is only a convenience, which isn't hard to work around. For durability on a trailer boat, I'll stick with the internal memory on the Axiom. No hardship to pop out the micro sd card and back it up to multiple locations off the boat.
This has turned into an epic .I've tried a couple of different approaches--first, as detailed above, just uploaded as saved gpx and ignoring symbol sets in GPSU. Ended up with virtually all red x's when I loaded them into the Axiom. . Not happy with that, tried working with the symbol sets, with the problem that the .usr marks from C Plot were being seen as Lowrance marks and symbols applied. Worked around it, tried some of the Raymarine symbol sets in GPSU. loaded them into the Axiom, still mostly red x's, with little variation. I'm doing this in downtime while away at work, so can't try the results until I get home. Getting frustrated, I've literally spent days and days on this ( work has been very quiet). Then the Raymarine forum suggested I purchase Voyage Planner, as anything which reads OK on there will upload unchanged into the LH3 on the Axiom. It seems to have worked, just uploading the Cplot symbol set marks into Voyage Planner gives me nine different types of marks in several colours. Not the original 14 different types with 6 colours, but it is a lot better than loading them straight in. So I have downoaded them back, and will find out if they are right about retaining the symbols when I load it at home.
Not 100% sure mate but I think there was another "C-Plot" so the mark set may not be for the Aussie version. I have spent a fair bit of time playing with Cplot files (used to work for TMQ both over here and in Freo). You may have more luck by messing around with importing the Cplot data into excel as a text or CSV file after trimming off the non required file information. There will be a fair bit of experimenting but it is possible. Might be worth saving a Raymarine file and converting to text or CSV via GPSU so you can see how the data needs to be formatted to then convert the other way. It's time consuming but eventually you will get there.
Scott, do you think this would work in my tinnie chasing flatties in less than half metre of water😆
Ok, this is out of left field but can you split your original WPs into several files dependent on their symbols. Import them seperatly and work from there.
With the right gear - yep. I also run the program on my mobile phone for when I'm in my tinnie and know a fella from south of the border who runs a tablet in a waterproof housing hooked up to his 30Hp E-Tec for digital instrumentation. It's only money
That is something I hadn't thought of. I can certainly filter by mark type, but I don't know if I can filter by mark colour as well. I had a a particular colour which wasn't used a lot, but was very important. I can see it on th import of my original file, if you select colour in the fields, but it hasn't survived any attempt to get it over--it just turms black or red, and I used both those colours on the same type of mark for a different reason.
Oh, well, It really isn't that much of a major, I'm starting to obsess a bit over it , which isn't healthy. If it goes over into LH 3 the same as it displays in VP, I'll be happy enough. Just having all those marks is a real bonus--I give fellow amateurs a sneak peek at a large scale view of it, their jaws drop, and drool appears.
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