Zumo User Forums

Hi guys,
Does anyone know how to send waypoints across to Garmin Zumo XT?
THis is the scenario: I use Google Earth to create a lot of road and off-road tracks and I have waypoints also created in Google Earth and embeded in tracks. Tracks and sent to the Zumo XT without major problems either using Basecamp and sending kml files or using Garmin Explore and sending GPX files yet waypoints are not sent across in neither the cases. Does anyone know how? Thanks, Pedro

Welcome @pmariares .

pmariares wrote: Wed Oct 29, 2025 10:45 pm Does anyone know how to send waypoints across to Garmin Zumo XT?
THis is the scenario: I use Google Earth to create a lot of road and off-road tracks and I have waypoints also created in Google Earth and embeded in tracks. Tracks and sent to the Zumo XT without major problems either using Basecamp and sending kml files or using Garmin Explore and sending GPX files yet waypoints are not sent across in neither the cases. Does anyone know how? Thanks, Pedro

I don’t know how waypoints are created or saved in Google Earth,
but Garmin uses the gpx file format which has a specific tag to represent Waypoints:<wpt> and </wpt>

Google earth does not use gpx files. So whatever you are creating in GE, it looks as though they are not in the format required by Garmin.

Tracks do not normally have waypoints embedded in them. They are declared at the top of a gpx file outside of any route definition <rte>….</rte>
And outside of any track definition <trk>….</trk>

The location referred to by a waypoint can be included in a route, but a waypoint is not actually part of a route or track.

I’d need to get onto Google Earth to understand the issue, and I don’t have that on my iPad. I’ve just approved your first post so that others can see it. You may get a better answer by the time I get back to take a look, tomorrow morning!

There is of course the (no longer maintained, but still working) good old RtwTool. It can do lots of conversions, including KML -> GPX

https://www.javawa.nl/rtwtool_en.html

Never tried converting converting KML Waypoints to GPX using that program, but I would be surprised if that would not work well.

I've used GPSBabel to convert Microsoft Streets and Trips gpx files to a format that BaseCamp can read. Not the same situation but possibly worth a try.

gpsbabel.org

@pmariares Google writes KML files which contain "placemarks" (similar to gpx waypoints) and "linestrings" (similar to gpx tracks).

I wrote some software a while ago, which will convert such a kml file to a gpx route. It converts the linestring (track) to a route, with the placemarks (waypoints) converted to via points in the route. From there you could use Trip Manager to convert the via points to waypoints. It would be a multi-step process, but it should work.

You can find the Trk2Rt software and documentation here https://drive.google.com/file/d/15Rianz ... drive_link.
You can find Trip Manager and documentation via this post viewtopic.php?p=24080#p24080

I originally wrote Trk2Rt for my own purposes but I have shared it and I do intend to build an updated version which would be more generally useful to others. I'm thinking I should change it to export the waypoints, and the track, in addition to the route, all in gpx format.
It would not be hard to do so and, I think, would be more useful.

Please let us know if this works for you, or if you find a better / simpler solution.