Geocaching Symbols on your Garmin GPSr

One of the coolest things that I have learned from a fellow geocacher is how to use actual geocaching symbols as waypoint icons on my Garmin GPSr.  From a glance, I can see where the nearby caches are and whether they are a micro, traditional, multi, etc.  It is assumed that you have already installed GSAK.  If you have not, you can find instructions on how to do this here.

There are a few slightly different approaches on how to do this.  I want to acknowledge two excellent sources where I learned how to do this:

• Geocaching Symbols on a Garmin 60 Series located here
•  KFBradley's geocaching icon set and GSAK macro available here

I am using KFBradley's latest icon set and have modified his macro a little bit for my own use.  This tutorial will take you through the steps of loading the icons to your GSPr and how to set up the GSAK macro. The video demonstrates using the selection of icons shown here:

	Traditional	Traditional Disabled	Multicache	Multicache Disabled	Mystery	Mystery Disabled
	Letterbox Hybrid	Letterbox Hybrid Disabled	Earth Cache	CITO Event	Virtual Cache	Benchmark
	Webcam Cache	Event Cache	Reference Point (child)	My Owned Caches	Stages of a Multicache (child)	Question to Answer (child)
	Final Location (child)	Traditional Micro	Traditional Micro Disabled	Found Cache	Did Not Find Cache	Archived Cache

Reading from left to right, each symbol in the "Custom" category will correspond to the waypoint type (cache type or child waypoint) in the table on the right.

In order to do this, you will need to download:

• xImage--this is a free program from Garmin that you will use to upload the custom icons to your GPSr. You can get it here .
• ZIP file containing the needed files for this setup (symbol files, GSAK macro, etc.)  You can download it from here .

I have only tested this on my own 60CSx.  However, according to the original web page where I learned about this, it will work on the following Garmin models:

• 76 Series
• 60 Series
• Legend C
• Vista C
• Quest 2

If you happen to try it on another model and it works, let me know and I'll add it on the list.

In order for your own (placed) caches to be correctly identified by the macro, you will need to find your GC.com UserID and do a simple edit of the macro. You can find out details on how to do this in this article.

Before starting, make sure that you have downloaded and installed xImage and downloaded the ZIP file of symbols and macro, as described above.

There are three parts to this tutorial:

• Part 1 demonstrateshow to transfer the custom symbols to your GPSr and how to set up GSAK to use them when sending waypoints
• Part 2 demonstrates how to set up GSAK to use the custom symbols when sending waypoints to MapSource
• Part 3 outlines how you can change the setup to use different symbols, if you wish

You will need to have FlashPlayer installed in order to view these videos.

Part 1 -- Putting Custom Symbols on Your GPSr and Setting Up GSAK

Part 2 -- Setting Up GSAK to Use Custom Symbols in MapSource

Part 3 -- How to Modify the Setup to Use Different Symbols

Tutorial Coming Soon!