Coordinates don't match location

Have you been transferring these coordinates manually, i.e. typing them in? (or mis-typing them in

Sam Penrod's coordinates entered into Google Earth look right to me - splat in the middle of some open area in Disneyland - ( it looks like there's some huge letters there, that say "California").

During a recent trip I tried to use my nuvi 360 to get the coordinates where I was and put them on my data storm map.
I did this in Indiana and in S.C.
both times it put me miles away from where I acdtually was.
In fact in SC where I was staying it put me off the coast and in the Atlantic.
and I didnt mistype in the numbers.
I am sitting at my home right now and the coordinates nuvi gives me are way off.

what are "SAM'S" coordinates and where can I obtain them.

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/4980

I believe these are the US locations.
I have the Canadian (all 6 in Toronto Ontario) somewhere. I will try to find and upload them if they are not already on this site.

If you're looking at the coordinates on-screen, maybe they're not being displayed in decimal format? On the Nüvi 310/360 you change the display format in a rather unlikely place: "Where to? | Coordinates | Format "

I'm assuming that if you Save your location as a Favourite, and then recall it and do "Show Map", that it's correct?

The Nuvi stores a copy of all the Favourites you have logged in \gpx\current.gpx. This can be input directly to POI Loader or another program for further editing.

This way you definitely avoid typos / or format problems.

Google Earth does not always give you the exact coordinates (I believe this has been covered in other thread by RT). It will give you its best estimates.

Google Earth uses their own Map API to retrieve the coordinates and the API returns the precision of the result. They are:

0 Unknown location. (Since 2.59)
1 Country level accuracy. (Since 2.59)
2 Region (state, province, prefecture, etc.) level accuracy. (Since 2.59)
3 Sub-region (county, municipality, etc.) level accuracy. (Since 2.59)
4 Town (city, village) level accuracy. (Since 2.59)
5 Post code (zip code) level accuracy. (Since 2.59)
6 Street level accuracy. (Since 2.59)
7 Intersection level accuracy. (Since 2.59)
8 Address level accuracy. (Since 2.59)

So any result code other than 8 means it is not the exact location. Worst case scenario is that the coordinate is middle of the country. Unfortunately, Google Earth does not give you the result code it receives from the API. However, you can tell from the description the location is associated with it when it displays it on the map to determine the accurary...

I'd been looking at the Google Geocoding API for use in GeePeeEx Editor, but it's fairly wild - I think I'll be going with Yahoo!'s version.

But I don't think this should be the OP's problem - I just tried typing "Disneyland" into Google Earth (half expecting to get Disneyland Paris) - it put me 232yards north of Sam Penrod's coordinates at the first attempt.

Phil,

My app calls both, but I found out Google Earth coordinates (when they do give you precise coordinates) tends to be closer to the MapSource calibration so even when both Yahoo and GE give me exact values, when I load them into MapSource, Yahoo is slighty off...

My observation

The title is "What is Garmin's POI Loader and what can it do for you?" Release 4 November 18, 2006
By: Sam Penrod. Here is the link.

http://www.gpsinformation.org/penrod/poiloader/poiloader.htm...

A little over halfway down the article he has the following example.

"Here are examples of a basic POI you want to route to."

-117.91914,33.80909,Disneyland
-77.03648,38.89868,White House

The article is a good example of how to make POI's and his examples are spot on. But when I use Google Earths coordinates for
Disneyland -117.55758,33.483920,Disneyland My Garmin puts me way off by about 40 miles to the southeast.

I guess I need to know where did Sam get his coordinates.

But how did you get those coordinates from Google Earth?

If I type "Disneyland" into the Search box,it returns "Disneyland,Garden Grove,CA".

The coordinates for this point are -117.919,33.8109 (from right-click properties)

You may well be right in that. What I meant was that Google seems more likely to give me "Address not found". Maybe the answer is to use Yahoo! first, and feed its output into Google to refine it

In your original post you said:

I wonder how much of an affect tapping while driving has on actual location. I wouldn't think 14 miles. And, what map did you load?

Anyway, I type Disneyland in Google Earth, and I'm about .13miles south and slightly west of the Penrod coords.

I put in the coords you gave and indeed went about 40miles SE.
I type in disneyland in google earth and get 33.810890,-117918772

What exactly are you entering in google earth?

Are you using the coords from your nuvi?

You have to be careful with google earth, should you move the cursor over the map, the coords will be at the cursor. Is it possible, that after finding Disneyland, you were zoomed out far enough and moved the cursor to the SE location and wrote those coords down? Exactly how did you get the coords of -117.55758,33.483920?

You can find a place with google earth, like disneyland, then use the yellow pushpin to the location you desire then copy/paste the coords from the resulting box without the coords "moving" on you. Perhaps this is a case of operator error.

I took the coords I got from "Disneyland" 33.810890,-117918772 put them into MapSource and displayed the same location.

There are many ways of getting coordinates. There are as many discussions on pros/cons of each. I have found that in cases like Disneyland it might be best to find the proximate location with google earth, then move the pushpin to a more desirable location such as parking lot or intersection of parking lot and street.

Poi Loader has nothing to do with coordinates, it is simply a tool to get your csv or gpx file properly loaded into your gpsr.

This is what I got from properties.

Disneyland, Garden Grove, CA
33°48'39.20"N
117°55'7.58"W

I may have a different version of Earth
I have 4.0.2007 Jan 5 2007

I tried your "Where to? | Coordinates | Format " with the coordinates above saved and pulled it up in favorites on my Garmin and the map is DEAD ON.
That works!!!

I did it again using the loader with the same points and I'm WAY OFF as before. Here's a copy of my .csv -117.55758,33.483920,Disneyland

Got any ideas what's going on?

You need to switch Google Earth to use Decimal format, rather than Degrees,Minutes,Seconds that it's giving by default.

(Tools | Options | 3D View | Show Lat/Long | Decimal Degrees)

I told you I was new...

I will reset and try this out.

Thanks to everyone for your help

Then you should read the FAQ page. There are ton of useful information.

I too am having the same problem. When I type my home address in Google Earth it's not even accurate by .25 miles.

Google Earth is set to display decimal format.

When I enter the coordinates to verify them in the "where to" screen they're dead on, but when I enter THE EXACT SAME COORDINATES into a csv file and upload them, they're 2-40 miles off.

What the crap!?

- jeremy

Garmin Zumo 450 - Mac

I'm not sure what I did, maybe mis-typed every line but it's working now.

I also changed the format of coordinates in the GPS to match the csv - that being decimal. Seems to be ok!

Did you set your GPS to also display decimal format? They all have to be on the same format for this stuff to work. My Nuvi defaulted to degrees and minutes, not decimal.

As for your home address being off, try this experiment: search your address using Google Maps as well as Mapquest. That will tell you if the map database is accurate. Both Navtec and TeleAtlas have been off with my home address for years.

One of the things I have noticed is that Google earth supports higher accuracy than my Nuvi 350. I can only enter coordinates with 5 digit accuracy in the Nuvi, but Google Earth pushpins typically only show 4 digits of accuracy but the cursor shows 6 digits of accuracy. These can be significant differences.

After reading the FAQ in POI Factory some time back...

I set my NUVI to format decimal.

I checked with Google Earth, and with
http://www.gorissen.info/Pierre/maps/googleMapLocationv3.php
and with Google Map.

My readings came up to be within .0005 agreement.

I have checked this also by putting it in a .csv file... and I was still within the accuracy given above.

If I am understanding all this right... then Google is pretty close to my NUVI.

I do think all the formats have to be the same.
I also think you have to be at the precise point on all the maps. It doesn't take much to be a long ways off.

I have ran some tests with Yahoo and GPSVisual.
For me anyway, I could not get the accuracy (with my NUVI) I got with Google. Maybe I did something wrong, I did run about 5 different tests with different points... but I could not get closer than about 1/2 mile or so with those. Yahoo was further off in the tests I did.

I figured that my NUVI is the standard so anything I use has to come close to the standard. I use the NUVI... right or wrong... and it leads me to where I want to go.
I have not found it to miss by very much... on any address I have given it --- so far.