Multi Day trip. File size. Etrex 20x.

[Planet X]

What's best practice on planning, for example, a four day trip on an Etrex 20x?
While it's easy to plan a trip on, which I use, RideWithGps, trying to load, say a, 500k route, it doesn't load too well.
Is it better to load day by day routes of say 120K or whatever?

Is the file size of a GPX file hampered by the abilities of the Etrex unit?
Is there an optimum file size?
Recently planned a 1500k south of Ireland trip and it wouldn't load on the unit. Was that stupid to try and do?
I have an sd card loaded.

Many thanks.

[frankly frankie]

Definitely, for multi-day trips the best is a Route-per-day (or Track if you prefer, or both).

On these Etrex GPSs, it's OK to have all your Routes and Tracks and Waypoints combined in a single GPX file.**  Or they can be in separate files, or any combination, it really doesn't matter.  The problem with lots of separate files is avoiding data anomalies where waypoint names are duplicated for example - these can easily occur but not generate much of a useful error message.  A single file automatically avoids all this.  They can be placed on the mSD card, or on the GPS memory, or any combination, again it doesn't matter.  I prefer to use the mSD card and avoid touching the GPS memory where possible.

** NB some other Garmins can't do this, but with the Etrex 20 it's OK.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'file size'.  I regularly load 2-week or 3-week trips in a single GPX file containing a Route per day.

There are well-known limits on numbers of points per Route, per Track, and in total, but they are pretty high and easily cover a month's cycling, let alone a few days.
If you want your GPS to 'follow road' a Route (autorouting) then there is a limit of 50 points in a Route.  More than this simply won't compute. This may be what happened on your Ireland Route.
You can store up to 50 Routes however, and it's easy enough to switch from one to the next, on the road.  Especially if you take care to name them sequentially.
You can also store up to 200 (I think) Tracks of up to 10,000 points each.

If you don't autoroute, then your Routes will work with up to 250 points.  This is how I like to operate.
However you probably can't load 50 Routes all of 250 points, there will be an overall points limit but it's undocumented (for this model) as far as I know - at least 8,000 points and probably more.
But I find it's very rare to need more than 100 points in a day, and often far fewer.  So 8,000 points is 80 days-worth.

[Planet X]

Thanks for the reply.

On for eg a 1500k route, planned on RideWithgps, can I "section " it into day routes.
Or do I have to do for eg, day 1 route, 147k, day 2 route 125k etc etc.

[frankly frankie]

I would say the latter.
But going back to your previous problem - in my very limited experience of RideWithGps, it is easily capable of providing you with a broken Route file, and this might explain why your Ireland route didn't work.  RWGps isn't alone in this, many online planners do the same thing - ie, supply broken Route GPX files - I've criticised BikeHike for this in the past.  Essentially, they can export a Track file but tagged as a Route - in a Garmin GPS this will not work.

My advice - if you want a Track GPX - download a Track GPX.  RWGps will do that just fine.  If you want a Route GPX - especially if you expect it to autoroute - don't use an online planner.

[Planet X]

OK....thanks for that. Looks like I downloaded it as a route.

So, if I download it as a Track GPX......it will show up and work fine on my eTrex 20x.
Just a breadcrumb basic track line, that's all I want. Not interested in POI's etc.

[frankly frankie]

Yes though you can still 'navigate' a Track on the E20, via the Where To menu, which gives a better experience than just displaying the bredcrumb trail.  A much more visible line, for one thing.

And for a distance of 1500km it would probably still be advisable to split it into at least 2, because even Tracks are subject to points limits, just much higher ones than Routes.  The problem is that if you load a Track or Route that exceeds the max limits, the GPS isn't very good at warning you about the problem - instead it just truncates the file that you load and then the first you know about it is when it stops in the middle of nowhere.  And RWGPS (and other planners) doesn't issue any warnings either, because these limits are Garmin-specific and so "not RWGPS's problem".  So you have to take charge of the process - know what the various limits are, know how many points you have in your file, adjust if necessary.