GPX Track or Route

[RobW]

By the way, what unit do you have, Rob?

Sorry, missed this. An eTrex 30. I had an old Vista C - nothing at all wrong with it, but I fancied a unit that could take some nice maps so I used LEL as an excuse to treat myself. The old unit served me for 10 years, so I figured I got my monies worth out of it

[RobW]

Have never used BikeHike - will take a look.

I tend to use the official Garmin MapSource. I found a variant of the OSM called velomaps (www.velomap.org)

Well, BikeHike being online uses a different set of mapping to what's in your GPS and a different routing algorithm so you're more likely to get the GPS choosing a different route to the one shown on the screen.  Eg Bike Hike may have a cycle path cut-through in its map set and route you via that, but on the road the Garmin may send you round the houses.

Mapsource for route planning and Mapsource maps in the GPS means it's more likely that the GPS will choose the same route as that shown on your PC screen at planning time.  Same base mapping data, same-ish routing algorithm.  So you should get the same route.  However, on the GPS forum I once said that I expected exactly the same routing on screen and in GPS on the road in this case and Ben T pointed at me and laughed at my naivety.

The quirks of the GPS's routing algorithm are one reason why some people prefer to display a track on the screen and keep an eye on it - maybe augmented with turn points from the route sheet.

Velomap is indeed an awesome repackager of OSM and I use it for foreign parts - I've been walking in Finland and Norway using Velomap maps in my GPS (Garmin 60CSx), and I'm planning my France cycle tour using it.  I always plug Velomap on forums as it deserves a shout out.  You can have the same OSM data in your unit as on your (Mapsource) screen at planning time - giving you a good chance of getting the same routing outcome in the field as in the office.   I did try to donate to them, but you need paypal for that, which I don't have, so I failed in my generorsity.

But for UK OSM mapping, I think Talkytoaster is awesomer.  You'll find details on how to get talkytoaster maps in the GPS forum.

None of this is LEL specific.  Just sayin' ...

Cool - great advice, thanks

[RobW]

Yesterday's preparation ride was great at testing many things, me included. And it proved I'm not nearly comfortable enough with my eTrex.

I thought I'd followed the tips on plotting a route, and creating a track for it, and including waypoints on the turns.

On the day, I first tried to do "Follow Track" in the eTrex 30, and chose off-road. It immediately drew a straight line to somewhere 45km away.

So I then tried the equivalent route from Where To, and also selected Off Road. Trouble was, we took a slight detour early on, and for the rest of the day it showed the "Next" point as one of the early ones we missed, and never caught up.

I was riding with friends, and so didn't want to hold them up while fiddling with tech, so just rode on - it wasn't a complicated route, so I didn't need the Garmin, but I wanted to prove the turn by turn, and the lighting up and pinging me when approaching a waypoint. Guess I'll have to do that next time.

Least it showed me I need to know not just how to follow a route, but also how to get the Garmin back onto that same route when part way along and needing to take a detour which misses out part of the route and waypoints

[Phil W]

Rob PM me your gpx file, and I'll take look to see if there's a particular reason it tried to send you 45km away.

[RobW]

Rob PM me your gpx file, and I'll take look to see if there's a particular reason it tried to send you 45km away.

Thanks - will send just now.

I'm technically savvy, but a novice at this stuff. I suspect, I didn't add the waypoints to the file in the right way.

[RobW]

Thanks to Phil W (and everyone else) for their advice.

My test run on today's Club 100 went much better. Have jotted some observations below (many will be eTrex 30 specific).

Preparation steps were as follows:

• I plotted separate "out" and "back" routes to avoid the circular routes problem.
• I created Waypoints first before using them to plot the route (using Mapsource), based on the advice from a few threads.
• I used the A01_R syle naming, and also put <<LEFT and RIGHT>> comments on them, since it wasn't completely clear which the "Next" data field uses
• I used WinGDB to convert the routes to tracks - allowing me to try Where To? using a Route on way out, and Track on way back

Findings were:

• Both Route and Track navigation worked much better, and I got my Waypoints showing in the Next as they came up. The Waypoint name is what the eTrex 30 shows - not sure if there's a way to make it show Comment instead. Will tinker with that next
• The Route option spent a worrying amount of time recalculating and I was sure it would decide on some other roads, but it stayed faithful to my plot despite only having about 10 waypoints over a 50Km distance. I've read when in autoroute, you can only use about 50 points of your own per route (despite much higher amounts being allowed overall). That should be fine per LEL section though.
• Only in Route mode does it beep and prompt you - worked well in countryside, but way too many beeps in towns. Seems the recalculate added instructions to every junction as well and told me about them. I'm not sure I like the beeping, but I like the idea of the device waking up and reminding me during night time sections.
• I couldn't find a way on the eTrex to make the Route transparent so I could see Route and Track at the same time.
• Having out and back waypoint's got messy on the return Track, with Next showing me both sets. I didn't notice this on the outbound Route, but will need to check it. If it does, I think I need to put them just before each junction, less than ideal, but means I always see the one for the current direction first as LEL backtracks and this will happen again.
• The text shown for Next is waaaayyy small - hardly readable with contact lenses in. Saw no obvious way to adjust this as yet.
• Battery life is looking great. The AA Energizer Lithiums now have 20 hours of navigation, and still showing a "full" battery, not even 1 bar dropped yet.

That's it for the latest test run - much better, still some things I'd like to improve.

[RobW]

So I've done several rides with the eTrex 30 now - not 100% representative, because I know these rides well, but as close as I can get.

There's aspects I like to using a Route for the Where To?:

• Having the device give me an arrow at each turn, and the Guidance text showing the waypoint names in a readable font
• Having the device light up when I need to turn, saving battery at night

There's parts I'm less enthused about though, the main one being that you can't see an underlying Track as confirmation it's not taking you on some weird path of it's own. Coupled with needing to use only 50 route points for each leg, and the effort to do that well rather than just use the LEL supplied GPX, I'm tending back towards following the little on-screen track, and seeing how much battery life I use with a few dark riding hours each day and backlit the whole time. So far the Energizer Lithiums have done 29 hrs of riding with 0 bars dropped, still showing completely full. So I reckon they may well cope as long as I pack a couple of spares.

All an interesting learning process.

[Somnolent]

I don't know to what extent the Etrex 30 is similar to the older Vista HCx models but here is what I do to overcome the issues you describe:

Track is coloured Magenta (overall this seems to show up as well as anything )
Route is set to "Transparent"   and when you hit "navigate" is asks "follow road" or "off road"  I select off-road.

Then on the screen the route actually comes up as a straight white line for the leg I'm on, whereas the magenta track is always following the wiggly road, so the two things are clearly different.   The "off-road" mode doesn't give the unit any freedom to go off and do it's own thing, and most crucially it is the only available mode if the route has more than 50 waypoints.
From what I've read I think it would do follow road with more than 50 routepoints (subtly different to waypoints), but I don't care: after one bad experience when I tried to let it find it's own way I now only ever use the off-road mode.

Of course the 30 will be sufficiently different to render all the above redundant...

 

[RobW]

I don't know to what extent the Etrex 30 is similar to the older Vista HCx models but here is what I do to overcome the issues you describe:

Track is coloured Magenta (overall this seems to show up as well as anything )
Route is set to "Transparent"   and when you hit "navigate" is asks "follow road" or "off road"  I select off-road.

Then on the screen the route actually comes up as a straight white line for the leg I'm on, whereas the magenta track is always following the wiggly road, so the two things are clearly different.   The "off-road" mode doesn't give the unit any freedom to go off and do it's own thing, and most crucially it is the only available mode if the route has more than 50 waypoints.
From what I've read I think it would do follow road with more than 50 routepoints (subtly different to waypoints), but I don't care: after one bad experience when I tried to let it find it's own way I now only ever use the off-road mode.

Of course the 30 will be sufficiently different to render all the above redundant...

Yep - that is exactly what I was hoping to do. There seem to be some limitations to the eTrex 30 I can't get around though:

• You can't set the Route colour (at all - no change of colour, hence no option for transparent)
• In Where To mode - if you choose Route, it won't show any underlying track that happens to follow the same path. At least I suspect that is the case, without the transparent option it's hard to prove.
• When auto routing - it will use a maximum of 50 points, silently ignoring any more than this. I have not proven this myself, but have read it enough other places to suspect it's true. I don't know if it differentiates between Via points or Waypoints in this regard - I've read threads implying the limit is on any points, not just waypoints, but I've yet to prove that for myself. It will happily show a track to follow with many more points, but of course then you're not getting any prompting. This last aspect is something I need to test on next outing - thanks for the reminder!

I'm still tinkering see if I can find a hacked way to do the above - but my experiments, and all the forums read so far seem to concur with the above.

Edit: I'm just clarifying that last point over in the GPS forum. I suspect maybe it will allow many more than 50 points in Off Road mode, which perhaps is my answer. Use that, convert the LEL GPXs into MapSource routes, stick in some waypoints of my own as reminders, and navigate using Off Road mode.[/list]

[Somnolent]

You can set the route colour to transparent in Mapsource.

[Greenbank]

You can set the route colour to transparent in Mapsource.

And then check the very small difference it makes the resulting GPX file so that you can use your favourite text editor to do it next time.

[RobW]

You can set the route colour to transparent in Mapsource.

And then check the very small difference it makes the resulting GPX file so that you can use your favourite text editor to do it next time.

You can do both of those - but neither changes the Route colour which appears on the eTrex 30 screen sadly. There doesn't seem to be a way to change that. At least not the MapSource variant anyhow, and I haven't seen any reports that doing it in GPX helps (would love to be proven wrong on that!)

[Greenbank]

You can do both of those - but neither changes the Route colour which appears on the eTrex 30 screen sadly. There doesn't seem to be a way to change that. At least not the MapSource variant anyhow, and I haven't seen any reports that doing it in GPX helps (would love to be proven wrong on that!)

Can it be changed when it's on the eTrex 30 unit itself? If so it'd be interesting to see if (and how) the file gets modified when doing so.

[RobW]

You can do both of those - but neither changes the Route colour which appears on the eTrex 30 screen sadly. There doesn't seem to be a way to change that. At least not the MapSource variant anyhow, and I haven't seen any reports that doing it in GPX helps (would love to be proven wrong on that!)

Can it be changed when it's on the eTrex 30 unit itself? If so it'd be interesting to see if (and how) the file gets modified when doing so.

Have not found any way to do so (or seen any thread documenting a way).

Am looking to see if I can make a non active Track visible when navigating a Route. That would at least let me see the part of the Track beyond the current position on the Route, which is really the bit that matters!

[Greenbank]

Am looking to see if I can make a non active Track visible when navigating a Route. That would at least let me see the part of the Track beyond the current position on the Route, which is really the bit that matters!

No idea about the eTrex 30 but the above is certainly possible with an Edge 705 so it's worth investigating. It's my preferred method of navigation by GPS.

[RobW]

Digging some more in the device menus, it seems there is a Hide/Show option for Tracks uploaded to the device, and a set colour option (not sure if any MapSource colour will be taken across, will need to check that). This is just for Tracks.

But couple with Off Road routing, it may help. Although I can't seem to make the Route transparent, if I set it with a small number of points, the Track can be seen under zig-zag straight lines of the route. Not quite as nice as a transparent route, but it may work to see I'm on track but still give me prompts. Will give that a try.

Has helped a lot having you guys suggest and ask questions - digging way further into what the eTrex 30 can do. All good prep for LEL!

[Phil W]

Presumably you've tried it in track mode only. That's how I run things on my gps. It's worked fine so far upto a 400km audax route, there really aren't that many turns that you have to glance at it all the time.

[RobW]

Presumably you've tried it in track mode only. That's how I run things on my gps. It's worked fine so far upto a 400km audax route, there really aren't that many turns that you have to glance at it all the time.

Yep - I'm marginally leaning towards Track mode, based on experiments so far. I like the beep/light up in Route mode, but I think the Lithiums will cope with a few hours backlight on each night.

Have also posted a thread in GPS section to see if we can lobby to get Garmin to re-instate transparent Route colour as an option, then I can have best of both.

[Mr Fitz]

I bought a Garmin GPS specifically for LEL so that it can wake me up to an oncoming turn and give me idiot-proof directions.  Therefore I need to use routes rather than tracks.

Being a GPS novice I have been battling with Garmin Basecamp and my Dakota 20 to get the hang of auto-routing.  I live in France, so I unfortunately won't have the chance to check that my LEL routing works before I come over.  Here's my approach, if it's of any help (but as I say, it's untested).

I downloaded the Talkytoaster UK map, since it seemed to be highly recommended.  I then downloaded the LEL track GPX files and PDF routesheets from the LEL website (by the way note that the website routesheets are very slightly different from the originals - v2.1 - published in a previous thread here on YACF).

Using the Basecamp "create route from track" function, I transformed the tracks into (autoroutable) routes.  However, when creating a route, Basecamp often seems to insist on suddenly taking you off on a wild goose chase, or adding a big loop to connect two almost adjacent points.  If I recalculate the route using a different "activity" - e.g. changing "bicycle" to "tour cycling" or "walking"- it will subtly alter the way it defines the route.  Sometimes this is enough to make it match the track, but generally not.  It then takes many hours of tedious line-dragging to try to force the route to align with the track.  Even here I've once or twice had to admit defeat and accept Basecamp's recalcitrant obstinacies.   Finally, the directions need to be carefully edited to remove any non-essential points in order to keep below the 50 point limit imposed for auto-routing.

Once I have all the routes defined, I can now laboriously go through their turn directions step-by-step and compare them with those on the PDF routesheets.  Seems to me that if these both agree, then the Dakota should correctly navigate me along the right route.  N'est-ce pas? 

The number of hours spent training for LEL pales into insignificance compared to the time I've spent battling Basecamp trying to get the routing sorted    But I reckon this method should be trustworthy.  If anybody sees a problem with it, please shout!

I now finally have all the routes defined and correctly matching their tracks, and am currently working on the side-by-side comparison with the routesheets.  I'd be happy to post the final route files here if it would be of help to anyone.  (I use a Dakota 20 and Basecamp 4.1.2 on a Mac, if that's significant.  And I don't know if my route data would only work with the Talkytoaster map?)

By the way, I benefited greatly from the discussions in these YACF threads:

https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=46003.0

https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=67515.0

[RobW]

I can only comment on the similar battles I've had with the eTrex 30 - which I know is too exactly the same as the Dakota:

• The turn-beeps only work when navigating by Route, not Track
• Auto routing is not my preferred option due to the risk of it taking me on some odd course of it's own. I'd rather follow a track on a Map, but still have the turn beeps
• There is a way to accomplish this - plot a very minimal Route which just has waypoints on the turns of the route sheet. But also load the official LEL GPX onto the Garmin as a Track as well. Be sure in the settings on the Garmin itself, to select each one of these GPX Tracks and select "Show on Map" and make sure it's a nice visible colour. I use "green"
• Then for each leg, pick the Route as your Where To? navigation choice, but choose Off Road as it's option. This prevents the Garmin from making any decision to take you some other way. You get horrible straight lines on the map between each waypoint, that don't follow the road, but you can see the track underneath most of the time to follow except where they overlap. Because you are following a Route though, you do get the turn beeps
• Some devices let you set the Route colour "transparent" which then hides the nasty straight route lines - the eTrex 30 doesn't have this option.

Much of the above is a restatement of other threads, it's just a distillation of what I've learned to formulate my usage plan.

It is a compromise, and not completely ideal - but it works for me. Especially at night, when the device lights up to warn me of an upcoming route point or turn.

[maxap]

Hello Mr Fitz and RobW,

I have also been battling with my Etrex 30. I am still not quite sure how I will use it, - track only or track combined with route.

I would be very interested in seeing any routes/tracks you have made up Mr Fitz.
I too live in France, - in the Limousin. Whereabouts are you?

[RobW]

Hello Mr Fitz and RobW,

I have also been battling with my Etrex 30. I am still not quite sure how I will use it, - track only or track combined with route.

I would be very interested in seeing any routes/tracks you have made up Mr Fitz.
I too live in France, - in the Limousin. Whereabouts are you?

My conclusion after experimenting on a ride is that a visible Track on a map makes you much less likely to go badly off course.

I'm lazy though, and like the beep/light up route prompts. The above approach does give that without too many downsides that I have found so far. Haven't yet created my Route files for LEL - they will be very simple though - only waypoints on the major turns where I want a prompt. Apart from that, I'll be using the published GPX files as the visible Track I follow.

[Mr Fitz]

Rob, I too have read the threads where some prefer to follow the track on their GPS, but I don't want the extra stress of needing to concentrate that much.  (I also like looking around a lot when I ride, so could well miss a small turn!)  Hence my preference to have the navigation directions and alerts that come with routing. 

So far, for my training rides, I've been creating routes by adding a small number of waypoints just after the key turns.  This has worked well, giving me advance warning as I approach.  However, there's LOTS of small roads and side turnings on LEL, and I reckon it would take a lot of time - and more than the 50 points limit - to ensure that all turns were covered.  Maybe I'm wrong there?  Hence my decision to convert the LEL tracks to routes.

I recently updated my Dakota to the latest firmware (which fixed a bug that caused the device to switch itself off when looking at elevation).  That was a big mistake!  Following this I found that my GPS no longer navigated my routes, and they all showed up on the map as a series of straight lines between way points.  After very much hair pulling and faffing, I finally discovered this was because the device had reset itself to "off road" routing, and - apparently - navigation doesn't work with this (maybe another Dakota bug?).  So I'm interested that you seem to get navigation directions on your Etrex even when the "route" is no more than the "un-calculated" linking of waypoints.  Will have to try that very soon.

Maxap, I'm down south in Les Bouches du Rhone.  Will post my final route files here (if I can find out how) when I feel happy they are accurate.

[RobW]

Rob, I too have read the threads where some prefer to follow the track on their GPS, but I don't want the extra stress of needing to concentrate that much.  (I also like looking around a lot when I ride, so could well miss a small turn!)  Hence my preference to have the navigation directions and alerts that come with routing. 

So far, for my training rides, I've been creating routes by adding a small number of waypoints just after the key turns.  This has worked well, giving me advance warning as I approach.  However, there's LOTS of small roads and side turnings on LEL, and I reckon it would take a lot of time - and more than the 50 points limit - to ensure that all turns were covered.  Maybe I'm wrong there?  Hence my decision to convert the LEL tracks to routes.

I recently updated my Dakota to the latest firmware (which fixed a bug that caused the device to switch itself off when looking at elevation).  That was a big mistake!  Following this I found that my GPS no longer navigated my routes, and they all showed up on the map as a series of straight lines between way points.  After very much hair pulling and faffing, I finally discovered this was because the device had reset itself to "off road" routing, and - apparently - navigation doesn't work with this (maybe another Dakota bug?).  So I'm interested that you seem to get navigation directions on your Etrex even when the "route" is no more than the "un-calculated" linking of waypoints.  Will have to try that very soon.

Maxap, I'm down south in Les Bouches du Rhone.  Will post my final route files here (if I can find out how) when I feel happy they are accurate.

That is interesting - I do get the navigation prompts following a Route in Off Road mode, or at least I did 3 weeks back on the last test! Mental note not to update firmware now just in case!

[RobW]

I agree with the "faff" part by the way - that seems to come in the box with the GPS.

For me, I want to be able to see/know that I'm on the right route (or at least not too far off it). I find that being able to look down at the screen, on or just after a junction and see I'm on the coloured track helps with that. The route prompts are very handy, but if I had to pick one I'd got for seeing the track. I know when I reach a junction to quickly check my routesheet or GPS, so the track gives me that confirmation. And it soon shows up if I've gone wrong.

YMMV - and of course I may find this doesn't work so well on such a long ride as LEL!