GPS POIs for NOAA Weather Radio Station, Ham Repeaters, and AM/FM Broadcast

[JASII]

I recently bought a Garmin StreetPilot 2730 and have now got interested in downloading and creating custom Points of Interest (POIs). A few days ago I was discussing how it might be kind of fun to have my GPS indicate the frequency of the nearest NOAA Weather radio and what city it is close to. We now have this for MN and IA:

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/1654

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/1653

I am thinking about creating this for WI. Does anybody here have any interest in this whatsoever? Granted, there are only seven different frequencies, but sometimes when I am traveling it is nice to know what the closest site is and what frequency it is on.

We have also down this for some ham radio repeaters.

http://www.poi-factory.com/taxonomy/term/40

And there are some for AM/FM broadcast:

http://www.poi-factory.com/taxonomy/term/38

 

[JASII]

I also have found a way for my Garmin StreetPilot 2730 to alert me each time I cross a county line. Since I organize my banks for listening by county, this can be very handy on trips where I might not always know when I cross from one county two the next. Or I am in the left lane and a large semi is in the right lane close to me and I don't see the sign for the county line!

 

[SCPD]

I have the Garmin Street Pilot c330. Nice unit. I suppose it won't work with what you're doing huh?

 

[JASII]

Yes,it will. Here is a list of the Garmin units that can have custom POIs downloaded to them.

The Garmin POI Loader is compatible with these Garmin units:


nuvi 310

nuvi 350

nuvi 360

nuvi 660

Venture Cx
Legend Cx
Vista Cx

GPSMAP 60Cx
GPSMAP 60CSx

GPSMAP 76Cx
GPSMAP 76CSx

Quest 2

IQue M3
IQue M4
IQue M5
IQue 3000

StreetPilot i2
StreetPilot i3
StreetPilot i5

StreetPilot c310
StreetPilot c320
StreetPilot c330
StreetPilot c340

StreetPilot c510
StreetPilot c550

StreetPilot 2720
StreetPilot 2730

StreetPilot 2820

StreetPilot 7200
StreetPilot 7500

It is very simple to do. Just find the coordinates of the points (county lines) that you want to be alerted to. Enter them in a .csv file that you create in Microsoft Notepad with the word Redlight somewhere in the file name and it alerts you when you get withing 400 meters of the selected waypoint. When I first read about this I thought it was going to be difficult, but it is very easy. Actually the most difficult thing was find a good online map with the county line boundaries shown, but I have located one that shows all of them for the US. Gee if someone wanted to take this to yet another level they could even enter some of their favorite public safety repeater frequencies and PL/DPL tones to help identify on the fly when distant stations are coming in. Think about it. Say 154.115 is entered as a waypoint several times with the PL/DPL of varioous agencies that have been identified. Then a distant repeater pops up you could scroll through the various entries until you get to the one using the tone identified and then you would look at the display and it would indicate how far away it is from you based on the coordinates that you had entered from the FCC webpage.

http://www.gpsinformation.org/penrod/poiloader/poiloader.html