Technology - Importing External Points of Interest in to Trekker 3.0

Martin Roberts

Wednesday, 18 October 2006

The term POI  within this article stands for Point of Interest.  I have written this document as a result of requests from trekker users and this is not official Humanware documentation so the methods offered below may differ from any product literature or technical support advice and may not be supported by Humanware.  

I hope that the information below will be useful to other users and it is provided as a document prepared in my spare time so not endorsed by my employer.

This is my method for importing external sources of POI information in to trekker after locating it on the internet.  As yet the feature is rather new and for advanced users.

In Order to make downloaded POI usable with Trekker we have to perform a number of steps.

1:  Download the POI information you require from a web repository.  Examples can be found on the pages listed below.  Note these are UK based POI databases.

http://www.poidownload.co.uk/poi/index.php
http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/tomtompoi.php
http://www.tomtomfree.com/

2:  download the free POI Converter tool from  

http://rjdavies.users.btopenworld.com/html/poiconverter.html

and install said utility.

3:  load the POI you wish to convert to Trekker format in to the POI Converter tool and append extra categories if required.   For example, you may wish to append vets and pet stores in to one file which you could save as vets and pets so that when you do a search in Trekker, you can select vets and pets from the list available in the source combo box.

4:  save the resulting POI information in Auto Route Pushpin format from the save option accessed from  the POI Converter applications file menu.

5:  Open the resulting .CSV file in notepad or excel and delete the first line as the Trekker import process doesn’t understand this.

6:  open up the map manager after connecting your pda and ctrl tab to the external POI tab.  Locate the CSV file on your pc and after selecting the ones you wish to add to your trekker, click the  install/remove external POI button to start the process.

Hints and tips

A:  Importing more than 10000 POI can take some time, just leave the unit to complete this task for as long as it takes.

B:  If you do import a large amount of POI you may find that the search dialogs in Trekker take longer to pop up and be usable.

C:  If you wish to quickly delete the external POI information from your trekker, connect to the PC and navigate to your mobile devices sd or cf card and the folder trekker/external and delete the external.sdf file.

D:  The imported POI may not have all of the information you are used to such as address and phone numbers  that you get when using the rich POI information Navtech supply within your Trekker maps.  These information databases are often created by other people and as such the accuracy of the info is not under the control of Navtech or Humanware.  

E:  When importing information in to the POI converter tool you must know the format you are importing and select this from the file type combo box within the POI Converter tool.

F:  The POI Converter tool is not a Humanware product.  As such Humanware will not support its use and questions should be addressed to the author of the tool.