Amtrak data for GPS units

[ruudkeulers]

Funny you should mention MIa. I had a Mia for quite a long time until unfortunately it was stolen. But I was really happy with it. Perhaps I'll look into a Mia.

Funny, I have a Mio 350. Never knew there's a Mia as well. Also Korean?

 

[Alice]

<snip>- rechargeable battery (preferably USB, as I have a solar powered/hand crank powered USB charger)

- ability to setup waypoints

<snip>

I'm wondering if I should check out the Mia's. Curious what the feature you're missing is on the Garmin's?

I think you mean Mio, not Mia. They are at http://mio.com/. Out here, Fry's discounts them significantly now and then.

How much charge do you get out of your charger? Many units take longer to charge than they provide hours of use. My unit came with two charging cables, with AC and cigarette lighter plugs on one end, proprietary plug on GPS ends. The third cable is typical A-B USB cable for downloading to GPS. GPS functions cannot be used when connected to the computer and instructions say to be sure GPS is charged before starting updates, so I suspect it does not charge. You'll need the manual for this kind of info.

My old Garmin was a lot more granular in multi-stop routing choices. It also allowed me to customize my preferred road choice to prioritize small, medium and major roads any way I wanted. The new one is much, much simpler to program but I used both of what they eliminated frequently.

Re waypoints and POIs, they are different, at least in Garmin's usage. A waypoint is a location you store on a route, as in my multi-point travels. It can also be a location you personally go to and say "save this spot, name it Best Fishing Hole" or a location you save by putting in an address or long/lat coordinates. In other words, you save waypoints one at a time. My new Garmin holds 1000 of these. POIs are locations you save in a batch and are what you originally asked about. The gpx file of Amtrak stations contains POIs. I can hold nearly unlimited of these by getting larger data cards. The other data category, route, also has limits; in my case, I can hold 10 routes. A route is a collection of waypoints and POIs in a specified order, so I do not need to re-enter the same series. I don't use this feature much, but think it would be useful on a train route you often take. However, setting up POIs with alerts would also work nicely. I saw a post somewhere (not here) of a guy who set up Amtrak stations with a 1 mile radius alert.

 

[manlymatt83]

Excellent! Thanks!