HomePort and built in maps?

Nope, that's how it works. You can try creating a virtual drive on your PC though as Homeport will read the map files from that.

Just to be sure I understand this - I have to first copy the maps to any SD card I intend to make recordings on or I cant see the map data on the PC?

Why is there no mention of that requirement anywhere in the instruction manual?

I dont have a clue about virtual drives but will look that up.

Thanks.

I have a brand new GPSMap 7610xsv chart plotter/sounder on my boat. It has no way to plug it into a computer. No USB or anything else. The SD card is the only way to get any data on or off the 7610.

The manual Im talking about is the owners manual for the 7610. It just says to record your info onto the SD card and play it back on the computer in HomePort. No mention of needing maps copied to the SD card first. By the way, the built in maps take up around 5 gigs and it takes about 30 minutes to copy them to an SD card. Very inconvenient because the 7610 has to be on the boat to power it up, so all this has to be done out in the weather.

I tried your idea of creating a virtual drive to store the map data but so far its not working. Homeport cant find it. Can you point me to a link that gives more details on exactly how to do that? Im probably getting the path wrong or something simple but I have no clue.

Thanks for the help!

See here

http://www.javawa.nl/virtualdevice.html

While it refers to Basecamp it should be the same for Homeport.

I will give that a try. I Hope it works for me. Im running windows 10 and that article dates back to the windows 7 days.

Thanks again for the help. You have been awesome!

7803

I tried the ImDisk option described in that link and after a lot of fiddling and trial and error - it worked!

Interestingly it also made the track play back work somewhat better on my windows 10 machine. I'll post on that in my other thread.

Thanks again!!

Fixing

If there's one thing I think we all would agree on, it's that HomePort should be "fixed" so it can read maps stored on a computer's internal hard drive. I would make things simpler and eliminate a large number of "help" requests on this forum.

After fooling around for a while I discovered that you can copy your Garmin folder to a USB drive and that will work as well as having the SD card in the computer. That helps a little bit, but yes, you should be able to just copy the maps to the hard disk.

Homeport also needs to be fixed so you can play back sonar recordings in Windows 10.

For years I have been complaining about HomePort not being able to read maps from the computer's internal drive, only from an external drive. I've seen the suggestions to create a virtual drive but that seemed overly complicated. When cruising with my computer, I would create routes but to copy them to my plotter I would have to remover the SD card with the map and insert a blank SD card to copy the maps to. This worked most of the time but sometimes my PC would get confused when I changed the cards and I would have to take the time to re-boot it and restart HomePort.

I've been aware that the maps can be copied onto a USB thumb drive, vacating the SD drive slot so it can be used to transfer routes to the plotter. Still, on a laptop, the USB drive would have to be removed to put the laptop in its case and sticking out of the laptop, it was subject to damage.

I recently became aware of a "mini" USB drive that sticks out only about 3/8" from the computer, much like a wireless mouse adapter. I bought one, copied the maps to it and the problem is solved!