1st off, when you buy a Garmin GPS such as the older unit 60Cx it ships without any maps, but it does come with a "basemap" that will get you from town to town via major highways and secondary roads, but has no detail, such as the street you live on, or the pizza joint/hospital/fuel station down the street. So now you find yourself buying a preloaded card, downloading it from the internet or buying the map set on cd, such as "Garmin City Navigator 2010" or "Garmin Topo Canada 4.0".
Okay, so you need to build a mapset with the City Navigator you installed, so in mapsource you select all the map tiles up to a limit of around 2000 tiles, and also a 4gb limit depending on the firmware version of your unit and the sd card's storage capacity. 4.20 doesn't seem to recognize anything above the 4gb limit, but that's enough for all of North America, and topo Canada and USA so unless I ride in Europe I think I'll be fine for the moment. Right. Now we have the map set selected, you plug in your GPS via the usb cable and select "send to device" and hit the "maps" toggle. It will take forever to build an index, then it will ERASE THE MAPSET ALREADY ON THE CARD and install the new mapset. Plan for this to take longer than an hour to do.
Now when you zoom in on your street to 5metres you'll see more and more street detail and underneath the scale it will no longer say "basemap" or "overzoom" but the name of your mapset.
Now for Routes:
I plotted a great route using Google Maps 2D, then viewed it in Google Earth, saved it as a KML file, then used GPSBabel (GPSVisualizer is a web based frontend for the same free program) to convert it to a Garmin database file GDB and open it up in my GPS, to find that all the lines I'd plotted were gone, but the waypoints were there. I did a bit of research, and I'm told that Google Maps won't handle more then 20 waypoints, so I'll try plotting it that way next time.
Tracks:
These are the bees knees, as you can plot a track easily and join it using the track editing tools. Once you have a track loaded on your gps, you can select it and use the "Trackback" feature to follow the exact same ground or street in forward or reverse. If I rode my bike offroad and wanted to share it with you, I'd record a track on my GPS and send you the file, you trackback and you'd be riding over the same tire tracks less gps in accuracy. I took a friends google map link, converted it via google earth and gpsbabel and came up with a track that allowed me to follow his every twist and turn without using those routes.
Routes:
Garmin has kind of a strange mix of criteria navigating you between two waypoints. Obviously one waypoint is "My current location" A and the next being B then on to C
If you get sidetracked or take the wrong turn between waypoints, the unit will fixate on Waypoint B until it determines that you have travelled past the "no return" point when it will fixate on Waypoint C. I found out the hard way that if you are making an intersection your waypoint, always choose the road you want two or three hundred meters FURTHER from the intersection in the direction you want to travel, that way the GPS will say "Turn left" as opposed to "Arriving at via point BLAH BLAH".
So you went onto the map and plotted about twenty waypoint to include as part of a route. Cool. Hopefully you named them something like this: 3001KingCitySdrd <== being the first of the series, then 3002KeeleSt, then 3003Highway9 etc. The reason why I name them like this, is so that when you see them on your gps they will be in order of how you want to use them, and they won't get lost with all your personal waypoints like your sister's place in Quebec, or your buddies cabin up in Muskoka, your worksite, that great bike shop down in NC called Wheelers. The hotel you stayed at last winter when ice fishing....
Now create a route and insert the waypoints as via points.
Here's the cool bit. When the unit actually begins to navigate between waypoints, it may prompt you with "Faster Time" or "Shortest distance", if you programmed your waypoints and via points close enough, then always use "shortest distance" to keep from getting back onto the highway.
The best part with the numbering sequence is now I can just fill the tank, ride, and if I need to, review the route and force it to navigate to a waypoint of my choice in the sequence I wanted. Can you see why I prefer tracks now? All I have to do is create the track with the pencil tool, save it and load it onto my GPS and hit Trackback. Routes figure themselves out sometimes for the good or bad. All done the route? Simply delete all the 3000 series waypoints and save that lovely track to share!
If anyone knows how to "skip to next waypoint" while navigating a route, please fill me in.
The google maps stuff? I just tried messing around with that to figure out precisely what works and what doesn't, and I can tell you that using the "MyMaps" feature and drawing lines that "follow road" do not translate well to Google Earth or to the Garmin.
Back to the drawing board...
If all else fails I always have the last waypoint of the day, the hotel programmed in so I can find and set it, then get there and unpack my paper maps.
I'm running a Garmin 60Cx which is a wee upgrade over the smaller and harder to see eTrex VistaCx. Both run pretty much identical software, are waterproof and battery operated.
I run a 12v waterproof accessory socket that I can use for power for the GPS or a phone etc. I find that my GPS runs about twenty hours on a single set of AA alkaline so I'm happy with that.
This past weekend down in West Virginia (when I found out that when loading the Canada Topo 4 I'd deleted all my American maps and had to use the base map to navigate somewhere "Over yonder")
Okay. So you want to ride the 507? I found out that I needed two waypoint for it in order to be effective, so I've 507 North end and 507 South end in my gps. First I set the south end and ride to it, then I'd set a fix for the North end if I felt the need. This way I can navigate to it from North, or South of it and hit the end I want. I use the orange bike icon to show it's a bike route.
Last year's set up on the Cabot Trail
