G'day cp. I hear you!

I have done some more faffing around and I'm fairly sure that the only way to enter waypoints into the E5DSI is in degrees and decimal minutes. These do get converted internally and the actual data in the waypoint file includes both the decimal degrees and degrees decimal minutes. I have written the database for entering waypoints in degrees decimal minutes, but could just as easily write a second database that enters them in decimal degrees.


I spent the afternoon testing the final product and it works well. It has all kinds of error "catching" stuff that prevents the user from entering the data in the wrong format (but won't stop you from entering incorrect data, of course.)

Basically it has a form that has Lat, lon, Icon, Waypoint name, Waypoint description fields. I didn't bother with the rest, but a later version might include stuff like altitude, notes, url and other stuff. Essentially, all you do is type the values into the database. Once finished, you insert the memory card into your PC, click a button and that's it! All of the waypoints get copied to the card in a flash. This means that it is a simple matter of putting the card into the E5DSI, load the waypoints from the card and its all over.

As it happens, I learned a lot about converting different formats and it shouldn't be hard to write a version of the program that can convert Hummingbird files to Lowrance files, or Raymarine files to Lowrance files, or pretty much anything else to Lowrance, for that matter. That would open up a World of possibilities for swapping waypoints.

As I said earlier, I intend to set the program up so that the data can be filtered to exclude or include waypoints using a simple query, but that will have to come a little bit later. All I have to do now is package it into a stand-alone program and find a place to store it on the 'net, where anyone who wants it can access it.

Cheers

Russ