Marine Electronics Forum - Garmin Homeport Help?

I am about to get a new boat w. a 7212 and was hoping to get my waypoints organized before delivery. I previously had a 3010 and before selling, transcribed all of my points on to paper.

If I go ahead and download Homeport, can I enter all of my points so that it will be easier to upload once I get the boat?

Do I need annything from the 7212 before I can do that ?

I will also be getting the G2 Vision card, which I assume I can upload to my computer later and have the rout planning at that point?

My primary goal is just to have waypoint managemnet with out manually transcibing them back and forth from the MFD to notebook to computer and vise versa.


The Garmin website is not very helpful withe regard to Homeport, so thanks for any help.

I agree with you on Garmin's website- not very helpful.

Try the Easy GPS software for waypoint entry. Much easier in my book. You can then import the points from the Easy GPS data file into Homeport.

Lazy Bones, if your current MFD will copy your waypoints to an SD card you can just use that to put them on your new unit. You can certainly use Homeport to store them now and use an SD card to transfer them to the new MFD. It is a little labor intensive to put them on Homeport, but certainly easier than doing it manually on the Garmin on the boat.

Mapsource is ver easy to use and with Andrens prpgram you can sort print upload and download from mapsource.

I have the Garmin 546s and use Homeport frequently. And yes, definitely enter your waypoints via Homeport rather than on the unit. Two good reasons: 1-you have an immediate backup and 2-it's a whole lot easier and quicker.

Too bad you didn't copy the waypoints from your old plotter before selling it. Would have saved you a lot of typing.

And I'm pretty sure Homeport can read the vision card and display the cartography like on your plotter. At least, I was able to copy the basemap that is included in my 546s to the SD card and display that on HP.

Thanks y'all. Definitely would have been easier to down load off the old machine, but could not find it in the manual. Oh well, never hurts to have a hard copy.

I aprreciate the replies.

You won't need anything other tahn downloading Homeport, and having an SD memory card to do the transfer from the laptop/PC to the 7212. Easy as cn be.... definitely bang them into Homeport.