A few months away, but I have some routes downloaded to the Garmin using the tomtom route planner. Some things puzzle me about supposed bespoke motorcycle sat navs though, and both the major manufactures seem to have these. Waypoints, hard to select a road at times without ending up on a side street. Tomtom and Garmin have features where you can select windy roads, block motorways or unpaved roads. But try to plan a route that mixes up short sections of motorway and twisty roads and they have a hissy fit. My Tomtom was horrible in Spain a few years back, set to avoid unpaved roads but do twisty sections. Ended up on more gravel tracks and dead ends than enough. Yes there are settings to avoid, block etc. But if the route is mixed.... There seems to be some bad software tbh. My Garmin has some strange ideas on routing. Pre planned, loaded route and it sends you down a side road that rejoins the main route. This can be several miles, often only a few hundred yards. Wtf? Can they not write a decent programme? So I have Copilot on my android. Works great in the car when used in the past. After some investigation it is possible to plan routes and save them. Though this needs to be done on the device, not on laptop and then downloaded. (If so have not worked that out yet!) To my surprise the Copilot programme is nice to use for planning routes. Only drawback so far is having the small phone screen to work on, so have Ggooglemaps open to view things at a larger scale. Waypoints. This seems to be a nice feature, set a waypoint by tapping on the route, select route through. Done. It selects the road, not a side road, driveway or some point in a farmers field. Only need to get within 200yards and the waypoint is reached. No driving around village squares to “arrive”. Now looking for a phone mount or holder. Then a back to back test of Copilot routing against the Tomtom.... I suspect the phone/Copilot will win. But probably down to the crap software that seems to be on satnavs, that like to re route for “short cuts” despite hours of pissing about to plot routes. Sorry about the longwinded post, Im sure others have had lots of fun with these devices too and finding something that works makes trips much easier.
You have to understand that when you use a satnav supplied software you must always be aware of the riding mode you are in when planning (ie route avoidance profiles etc) and that you have to use plenty of shaping points to make sure that your route remains 'static' when riding otherwise routes may be recalculated on the fly when riding. In your example above, how would any software know what to do in a mixed mode (ie what section of highway to include and when not) and when to allow gravel or when not. Just punching in windy road and hoping it will get you the best route to an end destination will always be a gamble. Basecamp is complicated, but route planning with all route options is a complicated business. I tried many ways (copilot included) but once you spend the time to understand it (or TomTom or any other satnav based program) and spend the time planning the route proper you will never look back. There are many helpfull YouTube's out there giving tips and hints on how to use the software properly. Another issue (in Australia especially) is how the environment effects your mobile when riding. I once had to stop at three service stations to cool down my iPhone in the ice cream freezers on a 40 degree day in Sydney. A riding specific satnav is made to withstand all that the environment can throw at it.
I understand the windy roads, highway avoidance features. what frustrates is downloading a route and the satnav re calculates. Put in more waypoints. Ok. But on a longer journey, lets say 200 miles with multiple junctions and road types the sat nav tends to go off piste. 50 plus waypoints to get it on track is hugely time consuming and without zooming in to micro detail open to error. I have tried Basecamp and know folks who use it, but what a longwinded process. It also doesnt make sense that the satnav has to be in a particular mode to follow a route, why does it decide to turn off on to a lesser road that takes longer when the settings for example just have avoid motorways selected? How difficult would it be to select a route the same way google maps works? Then by simply clicking and confirming highlighted roads, the nav should follow that route or at least prompt and ask if you want to stay on it. Individual waypoints in such high numbers should not be required to plot a route, a user friendly interface is well overdue. We will see, Copilot test coming up soon and it looks like it may work in a more intuitive way.
Btw, get a proper phone. Iphones overheat just using Googlemaps. I do laugh when my wife keeps telling me how superior they are. Then switches the phone off in the summer and places it in front of an air vent in the car to cool off when using several apps! They dont need to be in your extreme temperatures to overheat.
ITN Converter can load most route formats and spit out the CoPilot .TRP files. I've used this for years having plotted routes for my Garmins but tour with my mate who uses CoPilot on his phone. Works pretty well. As to route plotting for Garmin, I've never had a problem save from the very occasional minor deviation from the planned route. Having said that I am usually pretty meticulous about my planning using MyRouteApp but doing final finessing in Basecamp before saving the whole trip as a GPX file and manually loading that onto my Zumo 590. One thing that may help is to normalise the routing for the motorcycle profile in Basecamp, not sure if the default installation still does this but it used to throw in all sorts of undesirable avoidances. As an original MapSource user I just made the MC profile the same as the car one and all was well. I've never bothered with the 'curvy roads' option but plan using, in some stages, the Michelin mapping in MyRouteApp with those green edged roads. Also use Google Street View to check out what it really looks like.
I think you have more patience than me. Deleted Basecamp a while ago after mixed results. A very time consuming and glitchy programme. Motogoloco, was pretty reliable and user friendly. Maybe because it piggy backed Googlemaps. It needed multiple waypoints to keep on track but was easy and reliable to use. With the number of potential users it seems odd that there is not something much better out there, and it should be supplied by Garmin or Tomtom with the devices considering the cost. Copilot app western Europe £30. Garmin or Tomtom for motorcycle £ 350plus. Being ripped off.
Give MyRouteApp a try, for full functionality you need to pay an annual sub though. With this it can use HERE mapping and routing which is apparently the same as Garmin, seems about right to me. You can plan on PC/laptop as well as on your phone (a bit fiddly but usable in a pinch) and as it's cloud based routes on one show on the other. Route plotting is pretty intuative. But CoPilot is software only, the others are stand alone systems...
If you are using 50 plus waypoints to force a route in basecamp then you are not in the correct ride profile, some setting is forcing it to reroute differently. If you know how to use it, Basecamp really is the best. It is not intuitive at first use, but every complexity is there for a reason
This is a video I did years ago when I switched to an early version of Basecamp. Not sure if the same still applies on the default install but maybe worth checking. Drastically reduces the number of routing nodes required to influence a route to your will.
My issue with all these things is when adding waypoint, often as described above off the road, it routes you there. So you end up doing a 300 yd ride the. U turn or it won’t continue the route. I have turned auto calculate off and my garmin doesn't then pick up you are the route and missing that waypoint so you end up watching the screen and not getting turn by turn.
Ah well. Deleted programme again. Glitchy as fcuk. It cant find Luzy, a decent sized place in France. Its on the satnav but Garmin maps cannot find it despite reading the map from the device. Just cant be bothered with it.
Luz Luzy, Luzy-sur-Marne or Luzy-Saint-Martin? They're all there when I searched just now... far better to have maps installed on your PC if you have the space. Not sure if the Zumo 595 has USB3 but the 590 is dog slow at loading maps as it's only USB2 I believe. I must admit as a dyed in the wool Garmin Mapsource user I scampered back to that when Basecamp was first introduced, in 2011 ISTR, and I tried it briefly. Some months later they announced that they were ceasing development of Mapsource so my hand was sort of forced. I gave myself 4 hours to sit down and try it again. I didn't look back from there as, with a bit of effort, I mastered it's nuances and found the advantages over it's predecessor. Granted it forms only a part of my route planning work-flow but I find it indispensable.
Hmmm. Got a 350lm. Will that slow things down? Not that Im buying another one even if that is part of the problem.
Start, end and any essential points such as meeting places, lunch stops etc. should be way-points, anything else should be shaping nodes (points used just to influence the route). The latter are ignored if off the road to the extent where a passing a way-point would try and take you back there. You also need to check your routes in terms of the accuracy used in placing both way-points and shaping nodes. If you just drop points from a high altitude and don't check then expect trouble. It's a case of garbage in, garbage out. The Route Properties panel has a 'centre map' checkbox that makes it an easy task to go though and check each is on a road.
do You have to load maps? Think mine is a 39 and iirc has all Europe on one map. But it often won’t find small /er towns or villages.
A frustrating error I made early on, and for some time, was mistaking shaping points for waypoints - as you say, shaping points are largely, if not completely, ignored if you deviate from the route, for whatever reason...waypoints are the way to go
In my experience shaping nodes will steer you back onto the route but in a subtle way, you can choose to ignore them and if you become closer to the next one the last will eventually be ignored. This is an inexact science and doesn't always work precisely as you'd like but for me it works as well as one can expect from an algorithm. Way-points are definite must visits and you will always be steered back to them if you chose to, or inadvertently, by-pass them. That's why I use them for start and end (these can only be way-points anyway) as well as places I must visit along the route. Shaping nodes are points of influence only whilst they are next in the route. Deviate and they will be ignored if, roughly speaking, the one further on can be reached either by being closer and/or without too much manoeuvring/turning around There is no perfect sat nav system as a/ everyone's needs vary, and b/ road networks are complex and varied things. MyRouteApp's main failing is that the only way-points are the start and end, all intermediate points are shaping nodes. Though you can load this directly onto your Zumo and, on the 590 and 595 at least, convert any you want to way-points.
