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Garmin Approach G6

The Indoor Golf Shop
I have used golflogix and caddie pro apps on my phone..I love my G6 approach.. You can view your club averages during a round.. I do it all the time..
 
dbdors said:
I have not been able to figure out what it is used for. I know it is a micro SD card slot. I have an extra 8 Gb card that I installed in my G6, but it does nothing. At one time I thought you could load background pictures but that doesn't seem to work either. The manual says nothing as you likely know.
Click to expand...

I asked Garmin some questions and this was their reply.

Question 1: Can I play the front 9 holes and then come back and finish the back nine holes on another day? Question 2:What is the purpose of the microsd slot? Question 3:Will there be any software programs in the future to use the data stored on your device? Like maybe printing a club distance chart with longest distance and average distance for a club?

Thank you for contacting Garmin International and for purchasing the Garmin Approach G6. I hope that you enjoy using it. Here are your answers:
Unfortunately, you really can't play the second nine on a different day. To do so, the watch would have to be left in "Play" mode and the batter would run out before your started or definitely before you ended the second nine. You would have to record your scores as separate rounds.
Regarding the SD card slot, there is no use for it on the Approach G6. The case for the G6 is the same case that we use for one of our outdoor devices and is used to have topographical map information available.
I don't currently know of any changes to our software that would give you the longest as well as the average shot for an individual club. However, that does sound like a good idea.

Please let us know if you need further assistance. Play well!
With Best Regards,
Tom S
Product Support Specialist
Automotive & Golf Teams
 
sean59701 said:
I have used golflogix and caddie pro apps on my phone..I love my G6 approach.. You can view your club averages during a round.. I do it all the time..
Click to expand...
+1 on viewing club averages. I can do it as well.
 
sean59701 said:
I asked Garmin some questions and this was their reply.

Question 1: Can I play the front 9 holes and then come back and finish the back nine holes on another day? Question 2:What is the purpose of the microsd slot? Question 3:Will there be any software programs in the future to use the data stored on your device? Like maybe printing a club distance chart with longest distance and average distance for a club?
Click to expand...
Yes you have to save to record the round, so as they say, you'd have to keep the approach on till next round.

I keep forgetting that that the G6 shares the same platform as the Edge 800 (for bicycling). Like getting a Chevy based on the corvette platform, but the engine and other features are limited.

As for software, have a look at Approach Stats 2.0, by SolutionsEtcetera, I just bought another copy tonight. They had bugs the first time and he refunded my money. Seems to work better with the G6 this time around. Not a lot of stats, but better than on the Approach. And it calculates handicap.
 
So I have the G6 now since January. It is my first GPS device. My golf has improved a lot this year and I really feel the GPS has helped. Have gone out a few times forgetting it, and really struggle if I'm not on my home course. I won't go into a full review of it because it has been done a few times already and I really can't add to much more, but there are a few things I would like to comment on.

So it's a golf GPS device and it does exactly what it says on the tin. It is brilliant at giving yardage, it's easy to use, the touch screen is very effective, the features such as moving the pin and pointing to places such as hazards for distance all work fantastically.

A few times... a very few times... the GPS has been off, as in 3 times maybe out of 50 rounds so I really can't complain about that. It did take a few rounds though before I could work it properly, as the manual is crap, really useless. You need to use the thing a bit to get used to it, and not to easy when you are supposed to be playing golf and not holding others up while you play with your toy!

Battery life.... Great, will easily get 3 rounds out of a full charge and some depending on how fast you play. However it does have one major major flaw which has caught me out a few times. Unlike other Garmin devices, eg my Edge 500, there is no auto power off after a period of non use, so if you don't turn it off after your game, you will have no power left for tomorrow!!

The only flaw I have on the course is with the scoring. I find sometimes hole indexes are totally incorrect and I can't figure out a way to adjust them. Is there? When recording scores, if you have it set to strokes, you can't change to stapleford mid-round. Or can you? I don't see why you can't just enter your gross score and be given both your net score and points.

I carry my bag and have it clipped onto my bag with the hook that came with it. I found a lot of the time, I was banging into it (without realising) as I walked so it would reset while I was recording distances. A reposition on my bag has solved that.... most of the time!

Now let's bring it off the course. It's awful. Garmin have really let themselves down here. They claim on their website that it gives great stats. It doesn't.

So I bought a Garmin because I already have one, an Edge 500 for my bike. What a piece of kit that is. Garmin have a program called Garmin Connect which is a cloud based system, and you plug your device into your computer, go to their website and click upload... all your activities are then stored online with amazing analysis you can breakdown. I researched before I bought my Approach G6 to see if it will work with Garmin Connect and found it would. It barely does.

Let me tell you how Connect works for my Edge. I press the button to start a cycle, complete the activity and press the button to finish the cycle. I can do this loads of times, creating many different activities. I can upload these to Connect whenever I want. When plugged into my PC/Mac Connect recognises device Edge 500 is connected and asks do I want to upload all new activities or select which ones by ticking boxes. It knows my Edge is a cycling device so automatically marks them as cycles, and I go in and edit them, giving names and some information about my workout.

Connect will recognise my Approach G6 and also asks about uploading. However, in the upload screen each game of golf does not appear to be a separate activity, but rather a separate track, with multiple tracks per activity. There is no way of closing off an activity (that I can tell) but they have seemed to magically archive themselves a few times for me. I'm not to worried about my games of golf being tracks because when they are actually uploaded to Connect they do become difference activities. The problem though is doubling up in Connect of the same activity as you can't choose which tracks to upload. Eg. I uploaded last week, and again today, all my games of golf (since the last achieve) are now in Connect twice, so I have to go through it and delete all the doubles. Connect also does not mark them as Golf, even though it is a golf device..... it should be default. There should also be a field in Connect to import your scores from the relevant round but that doesn't happen.

Now connect is great because I can choose to show all my golf activities for a period of time or just from a certain course and it will list them in a way I can compare them. Lacking the column with scores, FIR, GIR, stats so a real let down here. It does give me the relevant fitness info though, how far I've walked etc. so nice to compare them......sometimes! If for eg., I forget to turn off my device, throw my clubs in the boot and drive home, the map uploaded will be miles upon miles, even though I have actually clicked the button to finish my game. Makes my stats in Connect useless now.

GTG... will update later on
 
stevieob, I'm in my second season with the G6, and I use it for every round on nearly every hole. I don't bother with scorecards anymore, I just enter my scores in the G6. It is very useful to get distances to the pin, and it has impacted my club selection for the better.

The stats part is not very impressive, I agree. The only thing it is useful for is entering the data into some other software that will track your stats. That's what I've been doing. I need to remember things like up and downs, and if I wanted to go with putt length I'd have to mark that down somewhere (but I don't bother with that). I mentally remember up and downs and sand saves long enough to enter the data after a round.

I don't know anything about Connect, but I might be able to help with the reset issue when you're measuring shots. (I often look at the unit and realize it has recorded a touch because it has red lines measuring to points I don't care about all the time.) Just exit out of the measurement screen once you start measuring. It will keep measuring until you go back in and reset it. So you can still give a playing partner a distance while you're measuring a shot. I don't know if the measurement has to be above zero (as in walk a step before exiting) or not. I'm not completely certain, but I think if you press Reset and exit without moving it will not be measuring, but if you start a measurement and exit without resetting it will keep measuring.
 
Thinkrationally, thanks for that tip on the measuring. I had actually figured out your idea about measuring and coming out if it. However I have often noticed shot distance not measured so it's a good idea to walk a bit before coming out of it.

Regarding the measuring, I have measured a few distances and failed to save them... a nice 314 yard drive the other day... got brain freeze and hit reset by accident, but I do realise this was my fault. I have saved a lot of measurements though that I really shouldn't have, as in knocked down shots that will unfairly bring down my average distance. Has anyone figured out a way to remove a shot you have saved? I have also saved some shots to the wrong club, again can't figure out how to save.

I have also noticed that If I charge my device in the car, it will automatically create a track, even though the device is turned off. then if i play a game, the track is extended. It is becoming really frustrating when I am uploading to Garmin connect.

Now with regard to Stats, I realise Connect is not a golfing specific tool, but rather a place to store all your workouts. However there is no reason why Garmin couldn't use this platform as a base to recording the golfing stats. After all they do it for cycling specific info such as Cadence. It would probably require a drill down to deeper analyse golfing stats though, but I just don't get why it is not done, either on Connect or somewhere else.

When you plug your device into your computer nothing happens. One would think you might get a pop up to ask you what you would like to do / look at? But you have to know to dig into windows explorer and find the relevant files. Which by the way won't open properly with older versions of IE (the ones on XP) so you have to have Windows 7 or above. They are not supported on Safari either on my Mac, so I had to download Firefox to view them on both machines.

I will admit, the scorecard looks pretty cool, but it's a scorecard. Gives Par doesn't show information that is in there such as no of putts per hole and direction off tee. It will show the points if you have chosen stapleford. I'm leaving mine on that now, because with Stapleford scoring, it also shows you the gross/nett shots.

Here in Ireland when we play in our club comps, we key our scores into a computer at the end. If the club if efficient, they upload the results to a website called www.howdidido.com which lets us embellish our scores. Its pretty good, but very basic and free so don't expect to much from it. So for eg hole 1 is a 5. you get 5 options to tell it what you did with each shot. shot to fairway, green, bunker, rough, or a putt or penalty. No breakdown of distance or actual club hit, a miss left or right and lots more lacking. For good stats I would expect to be able to do a lot more, and I really though Garmin would give this option. It should record every shot, or at least allow you to break it all down on the computer / web after your round.


I would be interested to know how some of you guys are exporting your stats, and how do you contact Garmin, as I would like to raise some queries with them. They have a forum, but no monitoring on it form Garmin themselves.... at least not that I've seen or else they just ignore golfers!
 
Just bought the Garmin G6, as my first GPS device. No coincidence that I broke 80 for the first time in 5 years (although I have not been playing much in recent years) when I played with the G6 on Wednesday. The reviews in this forum were some of the reasons I decided to purchase the G6, so thanks guys !

As people have noted, the stats is really lacking. It is too bad, as it would not have been hard for them to do so much more.
I played the first round with my hdcp turned on. I found this to be a mistake. The Garmin nicely gives you a net score, but it turned out the hole hdcping was wrong for the course I played. It had been rerated and the Garmin has the old data.
Thanks to the tips in previous pages, I was able to copy all the files into my PC. I then got into the scorecard.xml and figured out their schema. From there, I removed the hdcp and changed all of the scoring to gross scoring. Double checked that everything was correct, and then wrote the file back to the G6. Worked like a charm !

Next up was the ScoreCard.html program. It is SERIOUSLY LACKING ! I ended up getting into the style sheet and figured out how to add 2 more rows to my Scorecard. So now when I view the scorecard, I have the score, next row is # of putts, next row is FAIRWAYS ( < to indicate miss left, > indicates miss Right, X is fairway hit ). I would really like to add GIR, but that is going to take some calculating, and I don't know enough of the XML syntax yet to pull that off.

But my bigger problem is the fact that you can only view one card at a time, which is not really as useful as it could be. That means I really need to get the data into a spreadsheet. While I could put it into Excel, I am only running OpenOfficeCalc right now, and its XML support is dismal to say the least.
I think the better bet is to write a program that will take the data from the 'course scorecard'.xml file, and write it into a CSV file. This file could then be imported into any spreadsheet, as all of them easily support this type of file. And, it will be easy to create new fields, like GIR, TOT # of putts IN, TOT # putts OUT, etc.

Has anybody on the forum thought about creating a program to read the XML and create a CSV file? It has been 10 years since I've done anything like this. If I had a snippet of working code, I can morph (read plagiarise) it into what I need.

G
 
it seems there is now some progress with Garmin and computer data.

The new Garmn Connect website, now gives you a dedicated Golf page. It is far from good, but it is a move in the right direction
 
Hello apologies if this has already been covered. I would like to add my old scorecards to a G6, is it possible to manually do this? If i just "play a new round" on a course and then edit the course xml files and and change the date, time will this work? Does anyone have any step by step instructions of how to do this? Thank you very much.
 
is this GPS tournament legal?
 
I just received the Garmin Approach S5 as a gift after previously using a Skycaddie. Yesterday, played (2) 9 hole rounds. When I went in and synced my device, it showed the 18 hole score (with no scores in the final 9 holes). I ended up deleting both scores from my Garmin Connect.

How do I indicate I am playing 9 holes (and not 18 holes) as this greatly distorts my score for that round and handicap. The skycaddie allowed me to indicate the round as either a 9 hole round OR an 18 hole round so the scoring/handicap will be correct.
Mark K.
 
Just ordered a new Garmin Approach G6 from my company rewards program (free is a good price right?) Excited to receive it and play a few rounds!
 
Garmin G6 game data

Garmin G6 game data

GolfKrazee said:
Just bought the Garmin G6, as my first GPS device. No coincidence that I broke 80 for the first time in 5 years (although I have not been playing much in recent years) when I played with the G6 on Wednesday. The reviews in this forum were some of the reasons I decided to purchase the G6, so thanks guys !

As people have noted, the stats is really lacking. It is too bad, as it would not have been hard for them to do so much more.
I played the first round with my hdcp turned on. I found this to be a mistake. The Garmin nicely gives you a net score, but it turned out the hole hdcping was wrong for the course I played. It had been rerated and the Garmin has the old data.
Thanks to the tips in previous pages, I was able to copy all the files into my PC. I then got into the scorecard.xml and figured out their schema. From there, I removed the hdcp and changed all of the scoring to gross scoring. Double checked that everything was correct, and then wrote the file back to the G6. Worked like a charm !

Next up was the ScoreCard.html program. It is SERIOUSLY LACKING ! I ended up getting into the style sheet and figured out how to add 2 more rows to my Scorecard. So now when I view the scorecard, I have the score, next row is # of putts, next row is FAIRWAYS ( < to indicate miss left, > indicates miss Right, X is fairway hit ). I would really like to add GIR, but that is going to take some calculating, and I don't know enough of the XML syntax yet to pull that off.

But my bigger problem is the fact that you can only view one card at a time, which is not really as useful as it could be. That means I really need to get the data into a spreadsheet. While I could put it into Excel, I am only running OpenOfficeCalc right now, and its XML support is dismal to say the least.
I think the better bet is to write a program that will take the data from the 'course scorecard'.xml file, and write it into a CSV file. This file could then be imported into any spreadsheet, as all of them easily support this type of file. And, it will be easy to create new fields, like GIR, TOT # of putts IN, TOT # putts OUT, etc.

Has anybody on the forum thought about creating a program to read the XML and create a CSV file? It has been 10 years since I've done anything like this. If I had a snippet of working code, I can morph (read plagiarise) it into what I need.

G
Click to expand...

I do note that your original post is going on for 4 years old. However, are you still interested in a "CSV" export? I have just acquired a G6 and note that Garmin's utility is sadly lacking (even now in 2017). So, I am in the process of writing a program to read, parse and analyze the XML files that the G6 puts on the device to record games. It is being written in MS VisualBasic.NET hence would work ONLY on a PC running Windows. I'm having a little bit of a challenge deciphering some of the data in the xml files but, to be fair, I only started this exercise two days ago. Are you still interested in the G6 and the data in it? If so, do you want to be a Guinea Pig to assist in developing/testing it?

Bob
 
Hello everybody,

I have just came across a dead Garmin Approach G6 on a flea market, and the back sticker was missing, and I thought that it is a Garmin Edge 810 and bought it for 10 euros.
I don't use it on our small golf courses, as I am still a beginner, just started a month ago. But I would like to use it as a Garmin Edge 810 if I could reinstall the firmware somehow. I am a pro programmer, but new to all Garmin stuff. I hope I don't get thrown out of here for this rather stupid question :)
Thank you in advance if anyone has some ideas.
 
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