UK Air Map for Garmin GPS 76

Summary:

not GPSMAP so only 1 meg memory

UK Air Map for Garmin GPS 76

Mike Townsend (guest) 08 Aug 2010 12:42

By accident I purchased a Garmin GPS 76 (instead of a GPSMAP 76). I know I can re-sell it on eBay but….

I have been told (if this is correct) that it will still record flights capable of being loaded onto XCleague. Are there any small, line drawing type, UK air maps that can be loaded onto this model and viewed during flight - or will this model only record flights? There is only 1 Meg of memory. I have tried loading some air maps but they don't show up - white on white perhaps?

I have a Car GPS that I can run along side, for finding out where I am.

Mike_T (Cheltenham)

Andy (guest) 12 Oct 2010 14:39

Mike,
the gps 76 won't draw maps. It will only draw tracklogs.
There is scope to draw small numbers of uncomplicated blocks of airspace as tracklogs, as was done at the worlds in Laragne, and the brit nationals this year. However, the uk airspace is very complicated with lots of non-contiguous regions, plenty of which are made from curves and not straight lines.
The difficulty with drawing blocks as tracklogs is that you have only 20 saved tracks to use, each of which can consist of up to only 500 points, all of which are connected by lines. In theory you could manually segment 20 blocks of airspace data each of 500 points or less (when the curves are approximated using lines) being careful to lump blocks together that make sense being joined by a line which isn't really there…
I had a look at doing it for my Geko, using Simon Headford's ukgarminairmap as a starting point, but it could be something like 3-6 months of full-time work, unless I implemented an algorithm to do it automatically. :/
I bought a gpsmap off ebay for £60 instead.