Very specific POI's?

Some POI are easier to edit than others in that they are grouped by state. Others are grouped by longitude. And then there are those you have no clue about because the contain virtually no information other than a name and coordinates.

Let's say your route is between Chicago and Dallas and you rarely travel east of Indianapolis or west of San Antonio you could sort the file by longitude and eliminate all POI having a longitude of -85 or greater than -100.

If the POI are grouped by state, then you can edit the file and keep only the states you are interested in. Either is fairly easy if you have some knowledge of a spreadsheet program.

If you want POIs via state, you can use POI Verifier II to create a POI file containing only the state you want. This procedure is based on the coordinates of the state and does not require any text in fields 3 or 4 denoting what the state is.

Or if you know which POIs in the file you want an alert, you can place an @mph in the lines of the POIs you want, then load without setting any alerts with POI Loader.
Example: McDonalds@40

RT

I can't give you a universal technique, and unfortunately the POI files often don't contain some of the information that you want or need. But one handy tool to help approach this task is a little utility called "grep". It is on almost all Unix and Linux systems, but free copies for windows are easily found. It will extract lines from a file based on a "regular expression" and let you write them to a new file. For example, if you have a file called zoos.csv and you want to extract just the zoos for Texas, AND IF THE PERSON WHO CREATED THE FILE INCLUDED TX IN EACH LINE FOR A TEXAS ZOO, then you could type "grep TX zoos.csv >tx_zoos.csv" and it would quickly extract just the lines that included the "TX" string.

You might want to scan POI files that contain your items of interest for other states along your route, and combine them all into one extra file to load. Omit your own state and no local proximity alerts. Doing it this way, as long as state information is there, would have the added benefit of including extra alternative POIs in case you get off-route or need to take a detour (when having the POIs is even more handy), as long as you don't cross into a state you didn't plan for.

And, of course, you could keep these extra POIs on a SD card and only slip it in the GPS when taking that trip, which would a;so prevent the local alerts, even if you added in-state locations.

here is the other issue of course...since anything other than the rest areas, will not be on the road I am driving on, a regular redlight or speed alert will not work, correct?

I will need to use the TourGuide radial alert, and use say 2 miles as the distance value, in order to have it alert me to a McDonalds or a BP station that are off an exit and down the ramp a little ways to the left or right.

I think that even with the tips provided above, about how to get a subset of points being very helpful, this might be more trouble than it is worth, at least until I get more experience.

I was just brainstorming more than anything else.

and only load that when I head out on this trip several times a year.

that is what I will do, if I decide to put in the effort on this little project.

I can't think of any reason for driving on a freeway and being alerted every time I approached an exit with a BP gas station within 2 miles - or a speed or red light camera for that matter.

If I'm driving down the Interstate, rest areas are important, and as I need gas only every 3-400 miles, I could search for a station when my tank starts showing somewhere less than a 1/4 full. When I reach my destination, or some town where I pull off to grab a bite, then the camera file would be active as I drove around on the surface streets (that is unless I'm in AZ or IL where they put cameras on the freeway.)

Can you imagine trying to go through someplace like Indianapolis and having the Garmin alert you every time a McDonalds is within 2 miles of the Interstate? I'd shut the unit off until I removed those alerts!

as I consider your thoughts, I believe I will halt this project at the brainstorming stage.

Just a bit of my newbie enthusiasm getting away from me.

I feel much better now

I am not familiar with the Nuvis, but with my 2820 I can pull up the POIs by each category that I have loaded the same as I can my favorites and it will show me the closest one no matter where I'm at.

Do you even need to tailor your POI's in the situation you've described?

Download the three POI files from this site - rest areas, BP, and McDonalds. Save each POI file in a folder named after that file. Use POI Loader to install the files to your Garmin. Set a 2 mile proximity alert for rest areas, and no alerts for the other files.

Each file will appear as a separate category under Extras/Custom POIs. So when you select Custom POIs you will see:

Rest Areas
BP
McDonalds

You will automatically be alerted when you approach a rest area along your route. When you want gas or McDonalds, just select that category and the list will show you the nearest locations.

I went kind of wild with my alerts when I started installing custom POI and ran into the problem of the unit almost sounding like a phone with all the dings. I now subscribe to the KISS standard - Keep It Stupid you Simpleton! Now about the only custom alerts are for cameras, rest areas and truck stops - oh and one that says "Gee Auntie Em, there's no place like home!" when I pull into the drive.

I just took our trip from Dubuque to Phoenix and found the 25 or so points that we either stopped at regularly or that caused the Nuvi to want to wander from my path and built a POI for myself. It catches things like motels and intersections I want etc. It will also help find distances etc. I used Google Earth and Garmin's Road Trip and Excel to construct the thing. It's not long but as we go, I might find things to add and will make note of them. I'm not sure if this is what you're thinking of, but it's easy to copy from one CSV POI to an Excel SS. I just open both on the desktop and go back and forth. Of course that's easy on the 24" Mac monitor, it might be harder on my iBook.

what you propose will work fine.

I was just overly enamored with the automatic alerts concept.

and as a_user states, too many alerts would be a problem and would actually reduce the effectiveness, and the fun factor, especially since I intend to be playing mp3's the whole trip. Every alert will interrupt the track that is playing.

Which reminds me:

I tried using mp3's as my alert sounds. That works fine if I use the internal speaker and I am not using the nuvi's mp3 player.

But if I am playing mp3's through the car stereo with my cassette adapter, the alert will try to sound, fail, and the mp3 player switches to the next track. From a post I saw here, that seems to be a glitch, and the workaround is to use wavs instead, by placing sox.exe, in the same folder where poiloader is installed.

Alas, even though many of us here have reported this problem to Garmin, they have not seen fit to fix it.