Humminbird Side Imaging Forums

General => General Discussion => Topic started by: bflippen on January 14, 2011, 11:39:45 AM

Title: Humminbird PC Help!!
Post by: bflippen on January 14, 2011, 11:39:45 AM

I am new to HUMMINBIRD as my new 998c si is my first bird.  I have always had brand x.  My question is this, when I manually enter my waypoint coordinates into Humminbird PC, from my lowrance files and look at them in Google Earth they may be off as much as 1/2 mile.  Are these going to be off that much if I convert them from Lowrance to Humminbird files and upload them into my bird.

Title: Re: Humminbird PC Hwlp!!
Post by: Humminbird_Greg on January 14, 2011, 12:10:06 PM

What coordinate format are the waypoints in versus what coordinate format HumminbirdPC is set up for?

Do you know what Map Datum the waypoints were made under?  WGS84?

Title: Re: Humminbird PC Hwlp!!
Post by: bflippen on January 14, 2011, 12:23:00 PM

Yes the Map Datum the waypoints were made under was WGS84
Both Humminbird PC and Google earth are set to decimal degrees

If I need to change any of these please reply

Title: Re: Humminbird PC Hwlp!!
Post by: sonar2000 on January 14, 2011, 12:56:54 PM

As long as the datum is the same then the position will be the same. 
You could see some minor variance if one were displaying decimal degrees and the other decimal min or sec, but it would still be very close.
It  would be nice if we could all go to UTM which is in meters. 
For some reason google earth does not always martch up wtht the same location as the unit but certainly not 1/2 mile...
Chuck

Title: Re: Humminbird PC Hwlp!!
Post by: Drifter on January 14, 2011, 01:47:10 PM

Hi,

Lowrance GPS data files are stored on a PC in their "*.usr" format.

Humminbird PC stores it's GPS data in the "*.gpx" format.

Google Earth uses their "*.kml" or "*.kmz" format.

Any program that "passes" GPS data to Google Earth has to do the conversion from it's "native" format to the *.kml or *.kmz format. The difference you are seeing could be coming from either program's conversion ~ based on it's current settings. Manually re-entering waypoints is another possible source of discrepancy. If you can export the waypoints from your Lowrance to a PC file, you can convert them to the format Humminbird PC uses (or straight to the format Google Earth uses). You can use GPSBable (http://www.gpsbabel.org/download.html) to do your file conversions or you can convert your files online using the GPS visualizer (http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/) website.

Does your Lowrance unit have a SD card slot?


Darrell

Title: Re: Humminbird PC Hwlp!!
Post by: bflippen on January 14, 2011, 01:59:43 PM

thanks for the info I am new to all this mapping stuff