Tone Ag Consulting Ltd.

One of the tools I find very useful in our crop scouting, damage claim, and manure management work is DNRGarmin.  The feature I use the most is its ability to transfer Arc View Shapefiles to a Garmin GPS.  This lets me upload field boundaries, set points within a particular soil group for ground truthing, or draw paths to be followed when assessing a field. 

The install for DNRGarmin is pretty standard: unzip the compressed file and run the dnrgarminsetup54.exe program.  Turn on your GPS, plug it into your computer, and you’re ready to get started.

Here are the steps to load a field boundary shapefile to a Garmin GPS:

1. Turn on the GPS and plug it into your computer
2. Start DNRGarmin
3. Select File/Load From/File…
4. Change Files of type: to Arc View Shapefile (*.shp)
5. Find the shapefile you wish to upload and select it.  You will get a “Track Loaded Successfully” message
6. Choose Track/Upload.   You will get a message “Transfer Complete.  A track consisting of # points has been uploaded.”
7. Using the map screen on your GPS, verify that the field outlines are in the right location.  I use nearby towns to check that the positioning is approximately correct, then compare the field outlines to those I have in Arc View.  If the tracks are way off, make sure that the projection for DNRGarmin (File/Set Projection) and the GPS (Setup / Location Format and Map Datum) match and try clearing and re-uploading the tracks.   

The same steps can be used to upload points, just substitute point or waypoint wherever I have written track.

There are a lot more features in the DNRGarmin program.  It loads points or tracks directly into Google Earth, Arc View, Arc Map, Landview, and Arc Explorer 2.0.  You can use it to calculate area, perimeter, and length for shapes.  It can geotag images.  DNRGarmin is a Swiss army knife of tools for a Garmin GPS.