I have an old Garmin Pilot III that I use with Navbox Proplan 5. Due to its age, it has a serial port connection, so my Windows 7 64 bit machine has a USB to Serial adapter running as COM-5.

Navbox uploads fine, so I know the hardware aspect is functional.

I have tried the Skydemon eval, but when I try and upload the route to the Garmin, (after clearing any existing routes on it), the name of the route goes over, but nothing else - there is no route information and no waypoints.

I'm either missing something obvious or there is a compatibility issue with the Garmin. The unit was replaced by Garmin in the last year after the old one developed a fault so it has the latest firmware.

Are there any other owners of a Pilot III that are successfully uploading to their GPS from Skydemon, and if so, did you have any problems initially?

Any suggestions welcome!

Cheers

Ed

I don't think the Garmin Pilot III is supported by SkyDemon.

Well the software specifies Garmin without any qualifiers so is there any specific compatibility listing that I have failed to find?

The online documentation states (Quote):

Garmin Devices

We provide support for exporting routes to Garmin handheld aviation GPS devices. First ensure the device is plugged in and has been recognised by Windows. Then in SkyDemon Plan, click the Send to Device button on the toolbar. Your route will be automatically named and exported, and will be available for selection from the route library on the device.



If the export is not successful, your device may be connected on a nonstandard port. You can change the port used by SkyDemon to communicate with your device in Device Connectivity Options window. By default it is set to "Auto" which connects by USB to Garmin devices.



The Garmin Pilot III is definitely a handheld aviation GPS device, and having verified that the correct COM port is being used (COM5), the Route name is correctly uploaded but not the actual route itself.



So either the online information is grossly misleading, or there is something about the configuration that I am missing. It would be helpful to clarify which.



Thanks

Ed

This may be completely off the wall. But I seem to remember that even with a 296, the early versions of SD meant you had to accept the route name given by SD as opposed to a meaningful text description ( eg sywell) supplied by the user.

You might try using the auto-derived route name. Bu am not hopeful!

D

SD doesn’t seem to work with quite a few Garmin units – fine with my 96C but not my MAP 60 for instance (communicates no problems but data transfer is truncated). I think they may be correcting this “with a tweak of the GPX code” the new version 2.3?



A workaround I have been using is to save the route as a GPX file, open it in EASYGPS (free ware) and then transfer it to the Garmin. Although they might perhaps not be too keen to support the competition – it would still be very useful to be able to transfer routes directly in to any Garmin.

We don't specify which units because there are more units out there than we have available to test with. This is why we provide a free trial version so that everyone can test every feature before they purchase.

The units we have tested most with are the 29x, the 49x, the 69x and Aera. The older models we haven't tested with internally but we gather from customer feedback that compatibility can be shaky. Because of the relative scarcity of demand for these older units we haven't been able to devote resources to investigating how we could improve direct connectivity, especially when there are freeware applications out there to facilitate upload onto those devices.

Thank you for the information about EasyGPS - this does indeed appear to offer a way of interfacing SD with older Garmin devices. Navbox still supports my Garmin without needing a kludge to communicate so will remain my primary planning software for the moment.