I have received a hell of a lot of really helpful advice from people on using all things Garmin and felt that I should repay that debt by posting something that may help the numpties here (amongst whom I class myself). So I promised to give some feedback on my recent attempts to use Basecamp to create some routes and to then transfer them to my Nav V. So here goes:
First so, I will apologise to the many here on UKGSER who will think that what I write below is teacghing them to suck eggs. As a Class A numpty, I was less than confident about creating my own routes. Indeed, my forst routes were all but unusable. No, I must be honest, they were unusable! But, through trial and error, and with advice gleaned by posts from many on here (stand up and take a bow Wapping, Dan Townley, Bumpkin, iand46 and others) I have arrived at a methodology that works for me. And I offer it here to my fellow numpties. Experts should ignore my posting, unless I have made any fatal errors in what I say.
I live just to the west of Köln (Cologne) and so the Eifel region is on our doorstep. I had previously read on UKGSER about about the “Motorrad Tourguide” published on this site:
http://www.road-concept.eu/tourenkarten
I settled on the four tour guides published here:
http://www.road-concept.eu/motorradtourguide-beim-holzschnitzer
I run Basecamp on a MacBook Pro laptop, but I think that all of what I say would also apply to it running on a PC.
As the Tourguides only provide a map, but no Garmin .gpx file of the routes, I sat down and used the Garmin ‘drag and drop’ procedure to recreate the routes on Basecamp:
* It is probably wise, before you start, to click on the “Maps” dropdown window at the top of the screen and make sure that you have the correct maps selected (i.e. the same ones as on your navigation device). Also go down to the window in the the middle bottom of the map and play around with the sliders for ‘Zoom’ and ‘Detail’ so that you can get the map view to your liking. These can, however, be adjusted to suit at any time in the following process.
* Move the map to the general area that you want to create a route in: to do this, just left click and hold down and drag the cursor so that the map shows the desired area. But before trying to do this, make sure that the “Map Tool” chosen (this is the box in the top middle of the basecamp screen) is the lefthand one, which is a “Hand” (which perversely is actually a right hand!)
- you can play around with the other map tools, but with the procedure below, I do not use any of them.
* Click on the “Create a new route using a drag and drop assistant” button, which is the third buttun from the left at the top lhs of the Basecamp screen.
* This brings up a “create route” window asking you to “Drag start point here” and “Drag Destination here”
* On the Basecamp map, select the town or general area where you want to start and point at it with the cursor. Then right-click (ctrl-click on the Mac laptop touchpad) on that general point/area and it brings up a window.
* Select the “Find places near here” option in that window.
* This brings up a series of numbered “Points of Interest” on the map window and a list of those PoI’s with descriptions down the righthand side of the screen. They are listed in increasing distance from the point you clicked on. You can increase the map zoom to help you select a suitable PoI.
* In my limited experience, I feel more comfortable using an existing PoI, but below I do tell you how to create your own waypoint. So I choose a suitable PoI from the list, be it a petrol station, car park, restaurant or whatever. Somewhere where you can actually easily stop and/or meet someone before you set off on the route.
* Left click on the chosen PoI in the table down the rhs of the screen and drag it to the the “Drag a start point here” and drop it there.
* Then use the same process to choose a “Destination Point”
* The list of PoI’s down the rhs of the screen restricts the amount of map you can see (at least it does on my 13” laptop) so, once you have finished with the list of PoI’s down the rhs of the screen, you can close the list by clicking on the little 'arrow in a box' in the bottom righthand corner of the Basecamp screen.
* I was doing circular routes, so in most cases I used the same Start and Destination PoI’s. But this isn’t a necessity.
* As soon as you have selected and dragged over both a Start and a Destination Point, the "create route” window changes to a window showing details of the route. I will refer to this as the “create route’ window. But, at this point this window only shows the start and destination points.
* At this point, it is worth checking that the “Activity” showing in the create route window is “Motorcycling”; and also unclick the “Autoname window” and change the Route Name to whatever you want to call the route.
- if you leave the “Autoname” checked, it will name the route based on what you selected for your Start and Destination points.
* If you click on the “Info” button in the “create route” window, it changes the display to one where you can change the colour used to highlight the route: useful if you have other routes in the general area and want yours to stand out a bit whilst you create it.
* Select some key points on the route you want to create; right click on the town or junction or whatever; select a suitable PoI from the resulting table down the rhs; and drag the PoI over to the “create route window” and drop it it in between the “Start” and “Destination”.
* Move on to the next key point and do the same, ad nauseum until you have a route which looks reasonably like the one you want.
* If you cannot find a suitable PoI at any the key points of your route that you need to define it, then you have to create your own Waypoint:
Zoom in so that you can accurately place your cursor over the point on the road where you want to create the waypoint. It was recommended on here (Bumpkin I think, in a Youtube video he made. Apologies if I have the wrong person!!) that you place such a Waypoint immediately after the junction you want to ride through or turn at.
* So right click on a point immediately after a junction and select “Create Waypoint" from the list that opens. A flag will appear on the map in the main Basecamp window.
* Right click on the newly created Waypoint on the map and select the “Add waypoint(s) to your route” option.
* The Waypoint will be added to the bottom of your route in the the “Create route” window which isn’t where you want it, so then left click and drag it up to the place in the list of waypoints where you want it to sit.
* This will have the effect of changing the route shown on the map from one which is clearly following roads to just straight lines between the various waypoints. don’t panic! You must click on the “recalculate the route” button which is a small circular arrow (the 2nd button in from the left, at the bottom lefthand corner of the “Create Route” window. Do that and Basecamp sorts itself out and your route goes back to following roads.
* So the basic route is now showing on your map. Time to fine tune using the Garmin ‘elastic band tool'
* Click on the route at a point where it is following a road that you don’t want it to follow, and drag that point over to a point somewhere on the road you do want the route to take. Release the click and the window will ask you “Do you want to move this point?”. Say yes, and the route springs over (like an elastic band) to go through the point you have just moved.
* It is worth experimenting (playing around with this facility) as you are unlikely to succeed in amending the route as you want at the first attempt. Don’t worry, as if you don’t like the result you just need to go up to the top of the screen, select the “Edit” dropdown menu and select “Undo”. Indeed, you can undo as many steps as you like by repeatedily clicking the undo button.
* Sometimes, no matter how much you play with the ‘elastic band’ tool, you just cannot get the route to follow the roads you want. If that happens, you probably need to add another waypoint using the process above.
- again, remember that the “Undo” button is your friend!!!
* Assuming you get the route you want by doing all of the above, you now need to clean up the route information before you think about finishing and transferring to your navigation device.
* in my case, doing all the above on a route which was 300kms plus, through winding back roads in the Eifel, meant that I had a route which had more than the maximum number of waypoints that my Nav V could handle 929 seems t come to mind, but I may be wrong). So, when I transferred it to my Nav V, the device warned me of this and split the route into parts, so that the waypoint limit was not exceeded in either part route. That is no real problem, as it just means that when you are riding your route, you have to select the Route Part 2 when you get to the end of Part 1.
* However, there are reasons why having too many waypoints is inadvisable: your device will audibly announce/call up your arrival at a waypoint, which can be annoying. More importantly, if you have to deviate from the route because of roadworks, diversions or whatever, then your navigation device will always try to get you back to the next waypoint, even if it would be better to abandon that waypoint and head to somewhere else further along your route. Wapping highlighted this, together with a solution, in post #66 above.
* So follow Wapping’s advice and change all your unimportant waypoints to ‘shaping points’. I would suggest leaving a few of the more important ones as waypoints: i.e. the start, the destination, a cafe/hotel/restaurant, a petrol station etc etc. Anywhere that mught be useful to you on the route. If you are planning to do the route with a group, it could even be a car park, so that you can regroup there. The rest can be usefully changed to ‘Shaping Points’ which your nav device will not announce.
* Follow the above and, hopefully, you end up with a useful route that can be transferred to your navigation device
If people feel it would be useful to have some step-by-steps for transferring the route to your device and ‘importing’ it onto your device, then I can (if asked) add that info later.
So, I test rode one of my routes earlier today and it worked a treat. I had a few problems with the route I had created trying to take me down roads that were for farm vehicles only. That was caused by me adhering rigidly to the roads that seemed to be highlighted on the map I was trying to copy. But, when faced with this, I could just detour and, after ignoring a few “Please do a u-turn when possible” messages, the Nav V recalculated my route and I rejoined my chosen route further down the road. The same happened when roadworks caused a major detour (the Germans seem to love to rebuild an entire stretch of road in one fell swoop, with resulting massive detours through the surrounding countryside, whereas in the UK they more often than not keep one lane open and control it with traffic lights. Whatever, the Nav V just recalculated and got me back to the route further on. That said, in one particularly big detour, the nav V was trying to take me back to the route too quickly and I could see that I would end up back at the closed/blocked road. At this point, the benefit of having a decent map comes to the fore (a point Wapping repeats many many times here on UKGSER). A quick stop, a check on the next likely towns on the route, and just follow your nose and the signposts on the road until the Nav V catches up with you.
- all the above proved the benefit of using ‘shaping points’ rather than ‘waypoints’: if my route had been created with lots of waypoints, I would have still been out there with the Nav V trying to get me to a waypoint hidden in the midst of the closed bit of road!
When riding these diversions, I was left wondering just how quickly the nav software tries to get you back to the desired route. i had a couple of big detours and it did seem that it may well have allowed me to miss more than one shaping point before it got me back on my route.
One last point, which others have also highlighted before, but it is worth repeating: when creating your route, make sure that you zoom in and check that any waypoints/shaping points you use in your route creation are on the correct side of a dual-carriageway. I had one point where I had missed this and had a nice ride up and down both sides of a dual carriageway as the software made sure that I passed through the desired waypoint/shaping point.
