Save Time and Money by Customizing Your GPS

GPS receivers are great for avoiding unscheduled detours on the road. But they can be even more helpful for planning a trip, whether it's a cross-country trek or a hopscotch tour of your routine Saturday stops. You can cut your travel time, and save money on gas, by creating custom waypoints for your GPS.

A waypoint--sometimes called simply a "mark" or "landmark"--identifies your home, a hiking trailhead, a highway rest stop, or any location you store in a GPS receiver. The waypoint might appear as an icon on a map page, but your GPS software can maintain much more information about it, such as its latitude, longitude, and elevation, and the time and date when it was created. You can even use a descriptive icon of your choice.

Most receivers let you enter a waypoint from a previously saved coordinate record or import one from a collection of waypoints, many of which you can download from Web sites offering GPS information (find out more about GPS Web sites). Each GPS receiver uses different steps to establish waypoints, so consult your manual for the details. If your GPS device lacks a 'waypoint' option, don't fret. Some units, such as the Garmin StreetPilot 5, save waypoints as 'Recent Finds' or 'favorites'.

Most GPS systems have a button or menu selection for setting the current location as a waypoint so it's easier to return to. You can give the spot a descriptive name, and you can choose an icon for it on the waypoint information page, which usually pops up after you mark a location. (On some receivers, to open the waypoint information window, you must manually select the waypoint that you just created.) Even on GPS-enabled BlackBerries and other devices that do not use icons, you can give each point a unique name, such as 'Parking lot' (see Figure 1Figure 1: Find waypoints easily by giving them distinctive names.).

Setting a waypoint for a known locale--whether it be the cursor point on a map, latitude and longitude coordinates, or even a locale previously saved as a waypoint and imported from another GPS receiver--takes a few more steps. Most current devices let you designate a waypoint by opening their Create Waypoint menu and selecting Create From Current Pos (or Position--the exact name varies). To enter precise latitude-longitude coordinates, select Create From Entered Pos (or Position). Then enter the numbers manually; 37.78328N/122.39359W, for example, sets the street address of PC World's offices in San Francisco.

Most GPS devices can store from 100 to over 1000 waypoints. Before you set out on a motor trip or hiking expedition, it's helpful to create waypoints for your starting point and for points of interest along the way (they're a big improvement over Hansel and Gretel's bread crumbs).

Say you are exploring Yosemite National Park by car and foot, and you have set waypoints for a parking lot at the trailhead and for Yosemite Village. As you wander along a twisting mountain trail, you realize that you aren't exactly on the trail anymore; in fact, you're lost. Fortunately, you can use your GPS device to call up a waypoint that will identify the distance between your current position and the parking lot. You won't have street maps, but you can use the compass and the directional arrows to set yourself on the right path back to the trail, your car, or the village. As you get closer to the waypoint, its icon will appear larger on your GPS screen.

When using street maps, most GPS receivers let you track and save your route as you move. By using PC mapping programs in advance of a trip, you can prebuild routes that will automatically create a trip log. You can even preset waypoints along the route, and import the fully routed trips to your GPS device.

GPS Maps With No GPS

If you have a Web-enabled cell phone or PDA, you can receive instant street maps of your current location with a subscription software package from Handmark. This service for people who don't have GPS receivers returns precise maps based on street and city queries that you send wirelessly. You can also get up-to-the-minute news, weather (with live radar maps), sports, stock prices, directories, and movie times and ticket purchases. The street maps can help you avoid having to ask for directions; but aside from that, the service's unlimited directory assistance (with reverse directories as well) more than justifies the $70 yearly subscription. For $30 a year, you can obtain just mapping and directory assistance.

A treasure trove of maps, tutorials, preset waypoints, and product support is available on GPS-related Web sites. These are our favorite Internet addresses for getting the most out of a GPS receiver and mapping software: