Railfan Technology > Bought a new garmin GPS

I just bought a new Garmin 2557 GPS for my car. It has the RR tracks at the .8 mile per 1/2" level and closer. My old Garmin only had the RR tracks at the 800' level and closer. My Brothers Garmin only had the tracks at the 120' level and closer So the tracks are visible at a more zoomed out level. The tracks are alternating black and white rectangles now and not tracks as the old one was. I can live with it since I can see them at more levels now. The screen is a bit bigger now also. This one also has lifetime traffic and map updates. There was a discussion about this a while ago and I thought I should just start a new thread.

Scott O'Dell

You can get the longitudes and latitudes of railroad/highway crossings from the FRA Database.
Garmin has a free tool to make your own POI's (Points of Interest).
These can be uploaded to the Garmin, and then you can set an alarm, at a fixed distance (I used one mile),
and it will ding when a grade xing is in that radius.
Kinda fun, and can be helpful when looking for that next access point in unfamiliar territory.

arrowspatial Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You can get the longitudes and latitudes of
> railroad/highway crossings from the FRA Database.

>>snip<<

I'd be grateful for the address of the database that shows
lat-long of highway crossings and their RR mileposts.

Be Well,

Tim Colbert K3HX

Celebrating 50 years in amateur radio.

Is it possible to import map updates from Garmin that have RR tracks whereas your current map does not ?

Garmin's gps typically support external maps (databases) that may be theirs or others (like openstreetmap).
For example you can get a chip with Ireland on it. This is how they do updates. That may be all you need.
There are Garmin stores around, for example on Michigan Avenue in Chicago to ask.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/30/14 07:46 by arrowspatial.

Haven't tried it but I read on TO that you can find the Lat/Long of the trackside detectors and then enter them onto the GPS device. The traffic info sounds great if you're plagued by traffic, like most of the Urban world, sounds like it will work out for you.

Tried uploading maps from Garmin that had the tracks on them to an earlier Garmin GPS that didn't show them. Didn't work. I just bought the Garmin 2597 and am very pleased with the detail and how far out you can zoom and still see the tracks. Also able to load all the waypoints (or whatever they call them now) from my older GPS, so that's another plus. I was using a TomTom for a while and it wasn't quite as good- couldn't keep all my waypoints backed up on my Mac like I could with the Garmins. Traffic advisory on the new Garmin is also good.

dharris