Re: FC6 and Garmin GPS

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'On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 07:12 -0800, Michael A Peters wrote:
> Howdy all -
> 
> I have a Garmin "etrex Legend" hand held GPS unit.
> 
> I bought it for my field herping hobby (looking for wild reptiles and
> amphibians).
> It came with a serial cable for connecting to a PC but software is only
> for Windows. I don't want to buy the software and try with w/ wine/CXO
> because it it doesn't work then I wasted money, and I have not had
> software that interfaces with hardware (such as a serial port) ever work
> well in CXO.
> 
> Since spring is almost here, I'd like an easier way to use it in Linux
> rather than just manually reading the collected waypoints and entering
> them into my field reports.
> 
> What I would like to do is to be able to read waypoints right off the
> unit through a cable (either serial or, if one is available, a USB
> cable) into Linux. It also would be nice to hand make some maps that I
> can use to easily return to a particular spot, or to give to researchers
> to get to a particular spot if I find a range extension for a species
> that needs to be verified or a remnant population for a species in
> decline thought to be gone from an area. Both of those things happen
> fairly regularly where I am at (though not yet by me), as there is much
> wilderness area that isn't well documented for herp species.
> 
> It also would be nice to be able to look at a topographical map, and
> enter waypoints into some linux program that I can then enter into the
> GPS to guide me with respect to how to get to a location that looks
> interesting.
> 
> Has anyone done this kind of thing in Fedora, and possibly know where
> pre-packaged RPMs exist?
> 
Hi, Michael,
Check the web for NMEA.  This is a standard for navigation I/O that uses
a serial port.  Most GPS units can produce NMEA-182 output, and you can
receive it through the serial port on your computer.  There are some
mapping functions that have generated it, but if you can write a small
serial port application, you should be able to retrieve the data and
present it anyway you wish.  You can also send data  to the unit by the
same means.  I had the Mariner, and it came with a cable to do just that
but the supplied software was Windows.  I haven't looked to get a
version for Linux yet.

Regards,
Les H


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