Hi

I'm a recent convert to SkyDemon - I'm very impressed overall.



I've had real problems though in exporting flight plans to my Aera 500, either directly or as a .gpx file.



After a lot of testing, I think that the problem is that my home airfield is named badly!



I fly out of Charelroi/Brussels South. That forward slash seems to be interpreted as a file/folder instruction during export rather than a piece of text.



I now have a workaround for this but is there any way that I can dit the name of the Airfield to avoid this problem?



Thanks

You can't edit the airfield name, and assuming that our chart creators source the data from the AIP, neither can we. Since this appears to be a bug in the Garmin software, have you spoken to them?

Tim



Thanks. I'll mail Garmin and see what they say.



Have fun.

I also have trouble downloading F;ight Plan's to the Aera 500. When I transfer the .GPX files, the Aera 500 crashes, The only solution I have found is to remove the .GPX files created by Skydemon plan. Plans created by other software Planning applications do not have this affect. Any Ideas for a solution.

I tend to disagree with Tim's answer that this is a Garmin bug.
I have the same problem as the topicstarter, and I agree with him that it is caused by the airport description with the slashes.

Garmin assumes that a flight goes from one airport to another, and uses/expects the airport identifier (ICAO designator) for all airports which seems to be logical. SD uses identifiers for navaids, why not for airports?

If I save an SD-route as a gpx-file, and I change the airport descriptions in the gpx-file to their identifiers, everythings works just fine!

So, in my opinion, no Garmin bug but a necessary change in SD-software for 'sending a route to connected device' and 'save as gpx (not the airport description, but the airport identifier, that is available and used for the flightplan!).

Tim, look forward for your reaction,
Mark

We put the name of the airfield in the name attribute, which is what you'd expect. I'm not sure what you're asking for here; it seems like you'd like us to change so that we put the identifier of the airfield in the name attribute, when its identifier is not its name. If we did this, what would we put as the name for airfields without an identifier?

Yes, indeed I suggested to change the airfields name to its identifier, Because that's what pilots use, and apparently what Garmin expects.

I had not thought about airfields without identier, to be honest!
Would it be an option to not use slashes in the airfields name, but hyphen?
Or...., use identifiers where available (which is the vast majority of fields, pilots use) and the current description (preferably with hyphens) for airfields without an ICAO identifier?

I am a pilot/instructor trying your software as a possible replacement at our aeroclub for the Jeppesen Flitemap software. I am very pleased with SD as far as functionality and user-friendlyness is concerned; but problems interfacing flightplans with widely used handheld Garmin equipment (at least the Area models), is for me personally a no-go.

I have also an IT background, so "if identifier is availble, use this; else use current description (with hyphen instead of slashes)" seems a possible option to me.

But again, you're the expert.

Kind regards,
Mark

Sorry, but changing the way we export to GPX at this stage is not something we would take lightly. If Garmin devices crash when given a slash in a name, they need to fix that bug. If they would rather have an identifier than a name, in the name attribute, that doesn't make much sense to me and seems to contradict what the GPX spec actually suggests. So we may not be able to help you here.

What the device should really do is look up the airfield at the specified position in its own database and use that, unless the airfield does not exist. Please bear in mind that the majority (not necessarily by movements) of airfields do not in fact have any identifier associated with them.

Hi Tim,



Today I tried to load some GPX files that I made in SkyDemon to MapSource but got an error message. I did this quite frequently a couple of months ago without a problem.



I´ve found a work around by exporting the flightplan in GPX format from SkyDemon - loading it into the freeware "ITN converter" and again saving it in GPX format - and then loading it into MapSource.



Works without a problem.



Cheers,

Fred

Tim,

Ok, I read and respect your answer.
But your apparent unwillingness to solve this problem (you can solve this within the SD software, even if Garmin isn't fully correct in this) means no SkyDemon for the members of our aeroclub.
That's the way it is; we will continue with Jeppesen.

Succes with your product.
Mark