1) Those of you who follow GPXs – what do you use to create them, and have you had more or less success with the turn based navigation using different tools? Are there any tricks to improve the navigation, such as use of course points or cue sheets?

2) I had a message come up when trying to start following a GPX that I’d used before (this was after a system update) that there was a limit of 50 ‘points’ per route. Never seen it since. Does this mean course points or what? Any clues?

Ride with GPS for route plotting
Original Garmin maps seems to give most reliable performance

Just done one (well, two – out and back) with ridewithgps, we’ll see how it goes.

However it won’t route you on trails it thinks you can’t ride on – even ones that are bridleways… Nanny statism gone mad!

I use Ride With GPS to plot routes.
Tbh, most of mine are road based, but with a bit of off-road here and there. (Gravel bike style…)
You can try the different map types to get it to follow a trail – this works sometimes. Otherwise, click on “Draw Lines” and you can plot a route where the “Follow Roads” function doesn’t allow.
(It works ok. I just did a ride in Mid-Wales following part of a route plotted like this.)
I don’t know about turn based navigation, as it’s a faff with the Edge 200 I have. Cue sheets are generated when you plot routes on Ride With GPS, but I don’t know how accurate they are as the GPS trail has always been enough for me.

However it won’t route you on trails it thinks you can’t ride on – even ones that are bridleways… Nanny statism gone mad!

Ah, somewhere in the settings are some little buttons to allow or disallow the unit to choose:
unpaved roads
narrow trails
tracks

and you can turn those on or off. Be aware that if they’re allowed, the unit will often default to choosing them. Quite regularly if I click along a road and then get the GPS to navigate it, it will tell me to follow the cyclepath to one side of it. It did it on a route in Coniston last weekend – Coniston has a long section of parallel gravel cycle track which, on the day was full of bloody dog walkers so I didn’t use it.

That’s normally due to the map on the unit. Talky toaster maps are good for showing bridleways etc but don’t show sustrans routes,garmin maps shows sustrans but not all bridleways etc.

Ah, somewhere in the settings are some little buttons to allow or disallow the unit to choose

I’m talking about on ridewithgps here – not the unit itself.

1. a mix of gmap-pedometer, endomondo, etc. and gpsbabel to (a) convert tracks to routes when necessary, and (b) upload to garmin (as a Linux user)

2. route or track? garmin used to limit routes to 50 points, then to 100 points. tracks were a lot more like 1000. device dependent though, so I limit my routes to 100 for my etrex, but was contemplating an Edge Touring.

I use routes with route points when I want a route to follow, but sometimes have a GPX track too in the device if i need to refer to it.

doesn’t help when the likes of endomondo (and I assume strava too) let you create a route to follow, but the export is actually a track. presumably because you can record a track and then tell it to save that as a favourite “route” so that you can link many recorded tracks as following the same route.

OSM maps on my garmin. OS is useless once beyond mainland UK shores. Garmin built in map tells me where some cities are.

RidewithGPS on alternately Talky Toaster and OpenStreetMap at the moment. Both are giving me mixed success at the moment as of a few months ago – I’m getting the odd “Route Calculation Error” and can’t work out why.

Molgrips
On ride with GPS if it won’t draw the line down a path just toggle to a different map

I’ve got velomaps on my unit currently. With regards turn by turn, it starts off working ok then it seems to interpret the next 8km or so of riding as one huge turn with the white arrow, so it waits for me to complete it, then does the same thing again. Sometimes turning it off and back on fixes it.

I tried using waypoints (converted to course points) manually placed with tracklogs, and it didn’t help although it did tell me about waypoints – and then for some reason the TBT guidance was replaced with GO SOUTH and in the unit’s cue sheet (gained by touching the instruction text on the screen) it told me my next point was 6,000km away.. presumably to the south.

I’m getting the odd “Route Calculation Error” and can’t work out why.

I had this last week. Route calculation error seems to me to be when it can’t RE-calculate your route when it thinks you’ve deviated. I turned route recalculation off, but it kept turning it back on. I think that when you sync with express it syncs your settings, but somehow always pushes settings from connect to the device, never pulling them. This means it always ends up overwriting your settings 🙄

For routes, I like this site http://cycle.travel/ the owner of site seems to enjoy same routes as me, country lanes etc. Theres a big thread on CTC (or whatever its called now) that he regularly contributes to, if you have any new ideas or suchlike.

I turned route recalculation off, but it kept turning it back on. I think that when you sync with express it syncs your settings, but somehow always pushes settings from connect to the device, never pulling them. This means it always ends up overwriting your settings

THAT would explain the unbelievably annoying way that my unit resets to the default 5-item trip computer and route recalculation settings.

I already hated Garmin Express, now I’ve got another reason to think it is rubbish!

Ride with GPS is a bust. Great website, but it seemed to convert *every* track point to a course point, so the unit was bleeping at me every hundred metres or so. Great.

I think the problem I have with following TCXs is that the unit doesn’t seem to be able to pick up a route in the middle. So if I start navigating when I’m already on the route, it calculates it ok but when I start moving it places the first entry in the auto generated cue sheet as the first waypoint. I started navigating halfway along a track, and whilst the map looked okay, the first entry was the first point and it kept getting further away as I rode.

I couldn’t get it to pick up my route in the middle, no matter what I tried. However it works very well if you use the waypoint function and plan a route on the device – as long as the first one is on the way to the others and not behind you… I think I might try and make a route of waypoints using tracklogs…

Only time I get odd behaviour is when using non Garmin maps
No problem starting a route half way round using gpx or tcx files from ridewithgps.

Huh. Will try again with Garmin maps. I am systematically trying everything to try and figure out exactly what it does and why.

Ride with GPS have me a cue sheet which would have worked well with turn guidance turned off I think.

Very interesting, I’ve never ridden with my (walking/sailing) GPS other than for the odd waypoint and was thinking of getting a biking one as I’m riding a lot in unfamiliar areas. The above is useful as it seems the route following is far from ideal. I’m not interested in maps I think, I has OS mapping on my phone via their app

Maps on your device is far better than using your phone, imo. I have both.

Don’t get me wrong on the Edge Touring. It has some irritating traits mostly with regards turn-by-turn, but still is pretty powerful as a concept, at least for some use cases.

For example, last night I prepared two TCXs, going to and from a small woodland about 12 miles from here. The routes were on trails so needed navigation since I’m not familiar with the area. I followed the outbound track to the edge of the woods, then finished navigation. I then set a waypoint on the opposite side of the woods where my homeward course started, and I set route recalculation to automatic. I then rode vaguely in the direction of the waypoint, not taking trails that looked crap and taking ones that looked good – the recalculation kept me with directions to where I wanted to end up, but I was still able to explore singletrack in an unknown wood without getting lost.

The reason I am fannying about with it, incidentally, is to get turn by turn directions to work. If I plot a course using say Tracklogs or whatever, load that and turn OFF turn by turn, it displays the track on the map and lets me follow it exactly as my old Edge 305 did. Turning off TBT allows you to switch on off-course warnings, so it’s the same as the Edge 305 but with maps. But you also have the other features.

Monday night I planned a huge loop, and had to bail half way round as it was too late. I could’ve headed home on the road, but by setting a couple of waypoints I was able to get TBT guidance onto a traffic-free cycleway that took me all the way home. Route recalculation works perfectly when following waypoints.

These kind of situations I encounter a lot, because I’m often exploring new places – this is why I bought the unit and why I’m putting in the effort to work it out.

However – all the above is in relation to the unit’s low cost – I paid £120. If I’d had more money I’d have got an 810, but I don’t know if the TBT is any better. The screen probably is though.

That ^^^ mirrors my experience almost word for word – for all its irritating flaws, I have ridden thousands of miles with it all over the world and never actually got lost or not managed to do a planned ride using it, as far as I can remember.

Just this morning I rode 40 miles into work with it. Yes, after around 30 miles it didn’t notice I’d completed a turn it was flagging up, so I then lost turn-by-turn for the rest of the ride, but I got there! 😆

I usually have some idea of the local.layout having read maps beforehand. But the other day I had no idea where I was so just selected the return to start option. Worked very well too with one click.

rob has it.

Had strange behaviour on the thing tonight following a TCX, then I disabled the Velomaps and re-selected the course (where I was already a few km into it) and it worked perfectly.

Ok, more tips:

The routing with Garmin maps is still rubbish, but turn-by-turn navigation following tracks doesn’t work well with Velomaps. But you can easily enable and disable maps from the map display settings page. So on today’s ride I disabled velomaps to follow the TCX, then when I decided to re-route home I enabled velomaps, turned on automatic re-routing (off when following tracks), set routing to ‘quickest’, chose ‘cycling’ then selected ‘back to start’, and it worked fine. Except for one bit where it sent me round the houses to avoid a short stretch of road – maybe it was a private road or something I dunno, but all satnavs do that kind of thing occasionally so it’s forgiven.

Whilst following the track, I did have the thing where it stopped doing turn-by-turn and insisted the next point was 6,072km away. Except I saw it do it this time – it seemed to happen when signal was weak whilst I was going through some turns, and it got confused. To rectify it, I simply turned the unit off without stopping the timer then turned it back on again. Then I clicked neither Save or Discard but instead went to the home screen, then the map, and restarted the timer. TBT directions resumed correctly.

Also, I’ve had some updates recently – the elevation profile page now works properly.