Garmin Nuvi 650 how to enable custom POI's?

The built in POI's and custom POI's are kept in separate databases. Thus when you run a search under Points of Interest it is limited to the built in POI's.

Can you have the unit search the custom poi's?

Your White Castle may not be in the POI file you downloaded. Mmmmmmm Slyders!!

Yes, but you need to look under Extras/Custom-POIs.

My White Castle is in the custom poi file. Do you have to open the custom poi files and do a manual search for the poi you want? I thought that once you downloaded the files, the gps would use them automatically to find the poi's. If so, how do I activate the custom poi's?

Go to "where to", "My Locations", "Custom POIs" and it will be in that section.

Thanks

Hi, I have the same problem. I see it in my file directory that I have downloaded the GPX files to the Garmin/GPX folder, but when I go to Custom POIs on my Garmin, I only see entries I manually created earlier, and not the ones I downloaded from POI-Factory. How do I get to the downloaded POIs or did I save the POIs to the wrong directory or something. Anyone who can help? Thanks a bunch.

Try to verify your process in using the POI Loader. See FAQ here and on Garmin. Maybe for some reason that file is not loading.

hey thanks for the quick reply. I had just re-read everything and realized (duh) that I had to further download the file with POI Loader, after I had already downloaded from the source to the Garmin. Not sure why, but fine. Guess that's just the process (it makes sense now that I think about it). No problem. I did it and it's very painless. And it's all there under Extras as everyone indicated. Love it. Thank you.

If I am reading your post correctly, and you placed csv and/or gpx files directly on the unit, that is incorrect -- they should reside on your computer until being loaded with POI Loader onto the unit.

Place all of your POIs in a single directory on your hard drive before loading with POI Loader. Each time you load a POI file you have to load the entire directory again as the file on the Garmin is written over each time. If you load just one file, the ones that were on the unit will be gone.

That makes sense. Gotcha. I will do that from now on. Thank you.

Actually, when I loaded the new POI files, the old ones didn't disappear. Regardless, I should have placed the POI files in my hard drive (rather than in a Garmin "drive") and then load them onto the Garmin with the POI Loader. Thanks for your input.

Unless you loaded one onto the unit and the other onto the card or subfolder, that is not possible; the new POI.gpi file ALWAYS overwrites the previous file. If everything is working fine, that's great, but we just want to get you started on the right foot.

now that I've loaded my new POI's my Garmin can no longer find a signal. I've tried taking it all over town- doesn't work. Any idea why this might be?

Do you mean it doesn't find a satellite signal, traffic signal, etc? What model do you have?