Re: [Gpsbabel-misc] working around lowest-common-denominator Garmin restrictions

[Robert L. <rob...@gp...>]

> turned up, and I was sorry to see that upon downloading to my Garmin
> eTrex, the dashes had disappeared from my waypoint names.  Now I understand

The Garmin protocol spec says that only uppercase letters and digits
should be sent to the units. We have seen problems with (admittedly
older) units crashing if they're blinded by characters they don't
understand and Garmin digs in their heels hard with the "you deserved
it becuase you sent bad data to the unit". As you see from the code,
there's an explicit whitelist of (newer) units that are less uptight
about this. The USB models seem to be getting away with more and even
add support for newfangled lowercase!

> Robert, would you be interested in a more general solution?

I've been punished so hard by this in the past that I'm really reluctant
to release that safety belt for any receiver I don't have in my lab and
eTrex isn't one that I have.

Do you know how long it takes to get from "GPSBabel crashes my receiver"
to "the firmware crashes a few seconds after it sees a plus sign in a
waypoint name" when the unit is on a different continent and there's a
partial language barrier? It was crazy expensive for me...

RJL