WPL Sentences, OpenCPN and Garmin 158i GPS

[lpdsn]

I've been uploading waypoints from OpenCPN to a Garmin GPS (158i). Although the OpenCPN manual says that it is necessary to enable Garmin Propietary sentences on the connection I found that didn't work but ordinary NMEA0183 WPL sentences did.

So I managed to get the waypoints transferred across, except that only the first six chars of the names were used. The GPS supports ten chars so I had to manually edit the names to add the extra chars.

The trouble is I can't find where the six char limit comes in. It doesn't seem to be explicitly a limitation of the NMEA0183 WPL sentence according to the various bits and pieces I've found with a web search. It would certainly be easier in the future if I can transfer waypoints with full 10-char names.

Does anyone know where the limitation is and if there is any way around it?

 

[lpdsn]

OK. I guess it's manual edit of the waypoint name after upload then.

 

[prv]

I've just checked the NMEA0183 official standard and it says nothing about a character limit on WPL.

I would be inclined to inspect a sample of the NMEA being emitted by OpenCPN. If that has only the six characters then it's OpenCPN limiting things, which there might be a chance of having changed. If OpenCPN is emitting the full names then it's the Garmin ignoring them, and you're probably stuffed.

My bet is tentatively on the latter, but it could be either.

Pete

 

[bitbaltic]

A lot of older garmins (like say the 128) only had six character waypoint names so my guess is also that it’s something on the Garmin side. Older software ported to a newer machine or something like that.

 

[prv]

A lot of older garmins (like say the 128) only had six character waypoint names so my guess is also that it’s something on the Garmin side. Older software ported to a newer machine or something like that.

Yeah - the 158 is very much the successor of the 128 so I can well believe that it runs a slightly updated version of the same software. It's easy to imagine someone updating the entry, storage, and display code to handle ten characters instead of six, but forgetting to modify the import function.

Pete

 

[lpdsn]

I've just checked the NMEA0183 official standard and it says nothing about a character limit on WPL.

Thanks. At least good to know the official standard agrees with the other info out there.

I can't intercept the messages unfortunately as the tool I normally use for that is the ShipModul MiniPlex and I'm using that to link OpenCPN into the GPS. I wonder if anyone else can see what OpenCPN outputs for WPL in their set up?

They updated a lot between the 128 & 158. I understood that the old Garmin chartplotters only supported a proprietary waypoint transfer sentence, but as I said in post #1 ticking the box in OpenCPN for that seemed to kill the transfer altogether.

Anyway, I'm probably just going to have to live with the limitation.