Great to hear that we have resolved your problems. Come back to us, if anything more crops up, please.
casbar is spot on with his advice over tracks.
Some people like to have the track of a route displayed at the same time as running the magenta line of a route. I do it sometimes, too. The downside, as far as I can see, is that the device then displays all the tracks. This can get confusing if you are based in one place and using it to ride out from over several days. You are sometimes not quite sure which track you are looking at.
He’s also right when he says that changing an unannounced shaping point into an announced via point (or visa-versa) leads to a recalculation, which (to some extent or another) might be dictated by your routing preferences. I have never found that the recalculations alter the route too fundamentally, providing there are sufficient shaping points in place to pin any recalculation of a route into its correct place on the map. You don’t need to go mad with the shaping points though. I suspect that the recalculation is sometimes more to do with time taken estimates, as it is possible to set stop-over times to via points but not to shaping points. Changing from one to the other, would (if stop-over times have been set) lead to a time taken recalculation.
He is also correct that the XT is quite a powerful device. It is though, like any earlier Garmin device, also incredibly dumb. It will only ever do what its owner has told it to do. The real problems start when the owner (not the device) doesn’t know what they are doing. Get to know and love your XT; it really is very good.
casbar is spot on with his advice over tracks.
Some people like to have the track of a route displayed at the same time as running the magenta line of a route. I do it sometimes, too. The downside, as far as I can see, is that the device then displays all the tracks. This can get confusing if you are based in one place and using it to ride out from over several days. You are sometimes not quite sure which track you are looking at.
He’s also right when he says that changing an unannounced shaping point into an announced via point (or visa-versa) leads to a recalculation, which (to some extent or another) might be dictated by your routing preferences. I have never found that the recalculations alter the route too fundamentally, providing there are sufficient shaping points in place to pin any recalculation of a route into its correct place on the map. You don’t need to go mad with the shaping points though. I suspect that the recalculation is sometimes more to do with time taken estimates, as it is possible to set stop-over times to via points but not to shaping points. Changing from one to the other, would (if stop-over times have been set) lead to a time taken recalculation.
He is also correct that the XT is quite a powerful device. It is though, like any earlier Garmin device, also incredibly dumb. It will only ever do what its owner has told it to do. The real problems start when the owner (not the device) doesn’t know what they are doing. Get to know and love your XT; it really is very good.
