There is a neat piece of free software called POI Loader you can download from Garmin for use with most of their recent-model GPS units.

POI stands for Point Of Interest. My GPS came with about 6 million POI's all over the United States. A POI can be a restaurant, airport, a historical monument, gas station, ATM, post office, shopping center, movie theater, hospital, etc. In early 2000 when Sheri had her gall bladder attack at 2:00 AM in a town we were unfamiliar with I just went to the hospital POI tab on my GPS, searched for the nearest hospital, and it got us there.

The POI Loader software lets you create your own POIs and then transfer them to your GPS unit. You could load new restaurants, mailboxes, all of your friend's houses, etc.

It would be a pretty neat tool if it stopped right there, but it does two other even neater things.

First it can load POIs with speed information attached to it, and if you go over the speed specified by that POI it will start beeping at you. You can program in speed traps, school zones, tight curves, etc. If you stay at or below what you have programmed in it does nothing. This is a feature that gets a lot of use in the UK. The have a huge network of unmanned speed cameras all around the country. A small industry has popped up that keeps track of these speed cameras and daily posts fresh POI files on the Internet. People load them into their GPS units before a drive and get a warning before they approach a speed camera. How far away from the POI it sounds an alarm is dependant on your speed. I think it said it calculates the distance to sound the alarm so you have 36 seconds before you get there. If you are going 30 mph it will warn you when you are 1,584 feet from it. If you are going 70 mph it will warn you at 3,696 feet which is almost 3/4 of a mile.

The second neat thing it can do with POI's is a proximity alert. This gives you a little warning before you get to a point regardless of how fast you are going. The impetus for this was the stop light cameras that take your picture when you run a red light. You can also use this feature for other cool stuff. Maybe for all of the rest stops along a tollway so you do not miss one. Maybe all of the Starbucks to give you a heads-up in case you need a little caffeine. Maybe extra large alignment-destroying potholes. The possibilities are endless.

I just loaded a few test ones for around the neighborhood and went for a quick drive. They work as advertised. Very cool.

The record format is longitude, latitude, description@speed

So a speed trap record on I-88 might look something like this:

-88.17385,41.80625,Speed Trap@63

I would not get a warning unless I was going 64 mph or faster.

The proximity POI has two things different about it. The first is there is no speed indication associated with it so a record would look like this:

-87.64190,41.67796,Halsted & 119th

The second thing different is not in the record format, but in the name of the file you create. If the upload program sees the word "redlight" anywhere in the name of the file it will treat all POIs in that file as proximity POIs. That's it. Piece of cake.

By the way both of my examples really are either a speed trap or a red light camera. Feel free to use them.

The type of file these records need to be in is CSV which stands for comma separated values. It is just a text file with the extension changed from .txt to .csv.

You put all of the CSV POI files in one directory and point the POI Loader to that directory. Any CSV file it sees in that directory will get loaded. It will overwrite any previous POIs you had loaded on your GPS.

One of the things we do on a regular basis is try to remember where the closest mailbox is while we are out running errands to mail back a DVD from our on-line queue. I think a long term project I might do is shoot the GPS points for all of the mailboxes I come across in our city and then load them to our GPS. Yeah, I know my idea of fun is a little bit different.