Loading POI's to the Garmin c340

Unfortunately, the c320/330/340 models are not able to read custom POIs from SD card.

Here's a discussion that includes a couple quotes from Garmin technical support about c330. They start about 7 comments down:

c320/330/340 SD discussion

From what I've read elsewhere, it seems c340 has the same limitation. Here's a link to one of the posts I came across.

JM

Hi JM,

I have an e-mail that was just recently sent to me from Garmin Tech Support verifying what you guys have said is fact. The c320,c330, and c340 can not read custom POIs from SD card. I also found out that these units have an internal memory of 2MB's. Below is the original e-mail I received. Hope this helps everyone.

By the way, this is a great site. I will spread the word on the other tech forums that I am a member on.

---- ----

Thank you for contacting Garmin International E-Mail Support.

I will be happy to assist you with this issue. The StreetPilot c320, c330 and c340 units do not support Custom POIs that are loaded to the SD Card. You have 2MB of internal memory to load Custom POIs to. At this time I am not aware of an update to allow Custom POIs to be recognized from a SD Card on these units.

Austin Arnold
Software Support Specialist
Garmin International
1200 East 151st Street
Olathe, KS 66062
Phone: (800)-800-1020
Fax: (913)-440-5488

WOW
We finally got an answer from someone at Garmin on the Memory size for POI's for the 3xx series.

Thanks

Now, Was it 3 Gigs = 1 mb (LOL)

Yeah that kinda shocked me, 2MB is very small.
He had to mean 2GB. I hope he's wrong but from
the e-mail he sounded very knowledgeable.

Seems like a waste of a perfectly good SD slot.
If the hardware could support it, what a great
update that would be.

POIs don't take up much space. If the POI names aren't very long, you can easily hold 15,000 to 20,000 POIs per megabyte.

Wamico recently posted that he was able to load about 41,000 POIs in his c340. 2MB divided by 41,000 POIs works out to just under 50 bytes per POI, which sounds about right.

JM

JM,
I had no idea they were so small.
That is more than enough room for my needs
Thanks again for clearing that up.

Garmin for some reason sent me another message, Here is
it's contents.

Your c340 contains 2MB total which can easily hold around 30,000-60,000 Custom POIs without BMP files. There is no internal memory available other than what is available for the different functions the unit supports.

I wonder if enough of us contact Garmin if they can change the software to allow POIs to be stored on SD. Sure seems like a good idea.

Now to go find my seperate post on this and see if I can delete it since I found this thread...

I was scratching my head wondering what I did wrong. I thought I loaded the custom POIs correctly, but the darn things didn't show up. Thanks for this post.

I didn't know I could load the POIs internally on the c330, I figured that there was an SD card so that must be where the custom POIs live

I'm going to run home and give this a try.

So what functionality does the SD slot have on these units? Doesn't seem to have a purpose or am I missing something.

More conversation on this subject here

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/808

and

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/1265

the sd slot is for downloading custom maps, i think only ones supplied from garmin. but i read the delorme box and it said you can download their stuff to a garmin or any other brand that has a memory slot. dont remember if it is sd only.

So how does one go about DELETING the POI's that aren't needed, to free up space for the ones I actually WANT? I used the Garmin POI Loader; it just wanteds to suck in all the POI files I had in the Garmin directory - no chance at all to edit ANY of them, or select the specific files I wanted. Can't seem to edit/delete any of the POI's that are currently in the unit. I know for a fact that some of themn are bad (been to the Lonestar location in Reading; it's long gone). How do I fix this?

If you load your Custom POIs manually with POI Loader you have the option to "ignore" files you don't want and it won't load them !

If the files are CSV format, just open them up in Notepad on your computer and edit whatever you want. Then save the file and reload the POIs to the unit.