Replaced Nav V with Phone App

I thought I would post this in case it is of any interest to others. I know most people prefer to stick with standard BMW accessories, but I don't think BMW's satnavs represent their finest hour in terms of functionality and usability. I like to pre-plan routes, normally with a separate route for each day of a trip, and I found this a real trial with the Garmin based Nav V. As well as the BMW satnav, I also strongly dislike the wonderwheel which on non-TFT bikes is mainly used to control the satnav, as I think it ruins the left bar ergonomics and drove me mad being accidentally knocked almost every time I used the indicators on recent long trips, so much so that I went to the considerable effort of modifying a spare wheel to fit on the right side of the switch cluster, but without the Garmin it has little other purpose in life so I've now removed it entirely. I can turn the aux lights connected to my EZCan on and off with the indicator switch and don't feel the need to vary the brightness with the wheel.

The other problem with Garmin satnavs for me is that I hate the Basecamp software with its (to me) tortured inside out logic. Instead, I had been using the Tyre route planning software I got with a TomTom 400 I used on a previous bike. When the makers of this came out with its replacement, the excellent cloud based MyRoute route planning software, I moved to that. The only problem is that although you can export in GPX format the Garmin seems to have a not invented here attitude to imported routes and invariably screws up with them in some way. This required the extra step of running the routes through Basecamp to make them totally acceptable to the Nav, which was a right faff. While this was doable for a couple of guided tours I went on where the routes were completely pre-determined, it is not something I wanted to be doing while away on less pre-planned touring trips where I want the flexibility to generate the next days route the night before after booking the next hotel on booking.com.

When MyRoute came out with their own Navigation app for Android and IOS I decided to try that as it is totally integrated with their route planning software. It is still being (rapidly) developed, but is already a very usable package, and I left the Garmin at home and used the app on my phone on a recent tour around Andalusia where we were totally flexible on stopovers and routes, apart from tickets to the Alhambra in Granada, so it was essential to be able to easily generate routes in the evening for the next day after we had decided where we were going next. Although it is possible to generate routes on the phone I always take a small laptop for backing up photos and videos so used that for route planning. The software is web based, so all the routes are held in your MyRoute cloud account and are immediately accessible to the Navigation app on the phone, and can also be downloaded to the phone so they can be used offline. The Navigation app also allows you to pre-download all the maps of any country you are visiting in advance, limited only by the storage on your phone, so the app can be completely independent of internet access while riding.

I also run a GPS speedo app called SpeedOverlay, which can be set to appear as an overlay on any other app, as I like a reasonably big digital speedo which can be easily switched between mph and km/h which the bike lacks, and the one on the nav app is a bit small. You can see this as the black square on the top right of the display in the picture below.

Following the trip I've now sold the Nav V and made a couple of improvements to the phone setup. I got rid of the RAM X mount as it is too fiddly and tends to hit the phone buttons if not precisely placed, and also allows the phone to rotate a bit so it can go out of vertical/horizontal with vibration. I've replace it with a QuadLock mount which is excellent. I used their mirror mount which is the right size to clamp to the satnav mounting bar on the bike, though I have a Touratech extension on mine which mounts the satnav higher. This allows it to be fitted almost vertical whereas when fitted lower down it has to be angled up to be seen if you are quite tall, and then catches the light much more.

The other upgrade I've made is to buy a bigger phone. After much deliberation and research I decided on a Google Nexus 6 which has a great spec and is pretty much the biggest screened phone made in recent years. They have stopped making them now but I got an as new 64 GB version for only £165, and slightly more used looking examples are available for less. I'm really pleased with this and put it in a sturdy tight fitting case for mounting on the bike. This phone was made by Motorola so it works with the fast car charger I fitted to the bike to power my previous Motorola Moto X play phone which is a consideration as with a standard charger a long day on the bike could see the phone run out of charge as location services use a lot of power. One benefit of the big screen was that I was able to fit a clip on sunshade (intended for a tablet) which fits it and will help keep the sun off the screen. I've posted a couple of pics below.

The only serious outstanding problem with the app for me is a problem whereby Bluetooth instructions are not currently on a channel with sufficient priority to temporarily and automatically interrupt intercom communication between me and my wife on our Sena headsets. The developers are working on a fix for this but it was not fixed before we left on the last trip so we used a strategy of manually turning off the intercom whenever I really needed audio input from the app, such as finding hotels in town centres.

Fred

Tyre hasn't been replaced! It's regularly maintained. The only bugger with it for later Garmin units (including Nav V, etc.) is a maximum of 29 waypoints in a route. Tyre does't support 'shaping' points (though it did briefly a couple of years ago).

ChazzyB said:

Tyre hasn't been replaced! It's regularly maintained. The only bugger with it for later Garmin units (including Nav V, etc.) is a maximum of 29 waypoints in a route. Tyre does't support 'shaping' points (though it did briefly a couple of years ago).

Click to expand...

Good point, didn't mean to mislead, though I suspect it is not being actively developed any more, in terms of new features.

it always astounds me reading how bad the Nav5/6 is. And the lengths that people go to Mod it or remove it. It obviously comes down to personal preference.
When I fist got my Nav with the selection wheel i used to catch it now and then, Bit like the cruise control But I never do it now, so I guess I just got used to it.
This post like your whizz wheel is in the wrong place

Onahi said:

This post like your whizz wheel is in the wrong place

Click to expand...

That never occurred to me, and although I am specifically talking about replacing the NAV V on a GS LC I guess it could be applicable to other models.

And... I love being able to zoom the route in and out via the wheel.

Myroute app do have a work round for exporting routes to a Garmin, just change preferences to shortest route then back to fastest and the straight lines disappear leaving the correct route. A faff I admit but doesn't take long. I too have the my route app Sat nav app, I know they are still working on it but it has enough issues to make me only use it if I have to plan a route with my iPad whilst on tour.

The 2 big issues with using a phone as a sat nav are power, don't have a 2 amp charger and your battery will drain faster than you can ride to get to your destination and you have to remove your gloves to alter anything on the screen. Adaptive gloves aren't accurate enough though I have used a stylus with some success. An example with my route app gps app is miss a waypoint only slightly and despite being on the correct route it will keep routing you back to the point you missed, bloody frustrating, especially with 1/2 a dozen bikes behind you wondering why you keep stopping.

For all it's faults a stand alone GPS is still a better bet on a bike, Basecamp just takes some perseverance though since my route app came along I rarely use it. The nav app that comes with the TFT uses Tom Tom mapping downloaded to your phone which I use if I just want to go from A to B via the fasted route.

ChazzyB said:

And... I love being able to zoom the route in and out via the wheel.

Click to expand...

Good point - I did find that useful occasionally - though mainly when stopped and trying to work out how I had missed a waypoint! I've bought touchscreen compatible gloves for the phone satnav, but zooming in is not something I would try to do while on the move.

spm0912 said:

Myroute app do have a work round for exporting routes to a Garmin, just change preferences to shortest route then back to fastest and the straight lines disappear leaving the correct route.

Click to expand...

Can this solved by having auto recalc enabled on your device? Personally, I wouldn't have mine set up any other way. Any route I import always calculates as it loads. And if I go off route for some reason (missed turn, road closed, new one way street, etc.), the device recalcs the route and off we go...

spm0912 said:

The 2 big issues with using a phone as a sat nav are power, don't have a 2 amp charger and your battery will drain faster than you can ride to get to your destination and you have to remove your gloves to alter anything on the screen. Adaptive gloves aren't accurate enough though I have used a stylus with some success. An example with my route app gps app is miss a waypoint only slightly and despite being on the correct route it will keep routing you back to the point you missed, bloody frustrating, especially with 1/2 a dozen bikes behind you wondering why you keep stopping.

For all it's faults a stand alone GPS is still a better bet on a bike, Basecamp just takes some perseverance though since my route app came along I rarely use it. The nav app that comes with the TFT uses Tom Tom mapping downloaded to your phone which I use if I just want to go from A to B via the fasted route.

Click to expand...

I actually found my phone would charge up while using the satnav, but only if I use my Motorola Turbocharger car 12V adapter, which my phone is compatible with. The standard USB adapter I had on the bike before was useless despite saying it had a 2A output.

The issue with missed waypoints seems to be a problem with most satnavs, none of them seem to handle it well. The MyRoute app have made improvements to this, it now gives you a list of waypoints and you can select which one to go to next if you have missed one, or if the app restarts and recalculates the route for any reason. It used to do this a lot - if you stopped for lunch or petrol and took the phone off the bike it would invariably restart the route. However, this seemed to be mainly provoked by re-orientating the phone. They have now added an option to lock the orientation of the app and using this has pretty much eliminated this problem. It still think they could do better, the app knows where you are and knows the next waypoint along your route, so in the event of a missed waypoint should offer to take you to the next one unless you tell it not to.

ChazzyB said:

Can this solved by having auto recalc enabled on your device? Personally, I wouldn't have mine set up any other way. Any route I import always calculates as it loads. And if I go off route for some reason (missed turn, road closed, new one way street, etc.), the device recalcs the route and off we go...

Click to expand...

That is the case where you have just put a destination in the satnav - they all just recalculate from where you have diverted to, and will do the same if you are go off-piste between waypoints on a pre-planned route. However when touring if you want to visit specific locations and use particular roads for scenery or riding pleasure reasons you have to pre-plan the route with sufficient waypoints or other means to force the satnav to go the way you want, and not the way it thinks is best.

In this situation, and the more complex the route and the more waypoints you have, the more likely it is that you will miss the odd waypoint for various reasons, and most satnavs are sufficiently brain dead as to guide you back to a missed waypoint rather than automatically giving an option to proceed to the next. There are various methods provided by different manufacturers to intervene in this situation, once you realise what is happening, but in my experience none of them are particularly satisfactory.

The Garmin is actually quite good with missed waypoints, if you deviate off your planned route but then rejoin it down the road it will not try and take you back to your missed way point, unlike my route app.

I strongly suggest that if you have a planned route that you have plotted off a map to take you along certain roads do not have auto recalculate on, it will recalculate the entire route between each waypoint resulting in using motorways and nasty lorry choked N roads instead of the scenic routes you'd hoped to ride.
Another reason for using a Nav over a phone, you can zoom out if you need to make a deviation, map read your way around the problem and re join your route further on, the Garmin will kick back into life once you're back on the magenta line.

I have thought about using a smart phone. But some phones when hot shut down, the faster you charge your phone the battery degrades faster.

Thanks for the tip re my route app and straight lines this happened to me several times last month in Spain!

Think i will persevere with my Nav 5 - I also like the wheel for zooming in and out.

The nav 5 satnav looks part of the bike and is not immediately obvious when left on show that it is a satnav.

Have you used the Garmin smart link app for smart phones? really good for traffic updates and weather etc

I agree that it by no means a clear cut choice at the moment. For me the close integration between route planning and navigation and the sheer ease of setting up routes has convinced me to go with the MyRoute app, but I accept that it has its drawbacks, though the company does seem reasonably responsive to bug reports and feature requests.

However, I think there is a trend at work here which will see dedicated satnav hardware eventually being replaced by apps running on smartphones. TomTom already produce an app version of their system and I would expect other companies like Garmin to do so before long. There seems no point in duplicating computing power and memory capacity in multiple devices when one general purpose device can do it all with the right quality of software. Obviously this will take some time, but I suspect that in 10 years time dedicated satnav gadgets will seem like quaint electronic dinosaurs.

This probably won't become the norm until all vehicles have multipurpose secondary screens which smartphones can be hooked up to, using technologies like Apple Carplay and Android Auto. This is already reasonably common in the car world and I guess it will eventually spread to bikes, with BMW's basic TFT satnav feature being an indication of the direction of thinking, though I think a single screen shared with the bike's instrumentation is not going to be practical if you are going to run a full map based system, unless it is a much bigger screen.

There is also a reasonable likelihood that eventually the smartphone will be a general purpose computing hub which you will put into a docking station to hook up to a big screen and keyboard to act as a home PC. For many people, used in conjunction with cloud services for hosted applications like email and cloud file storage, this will be all the computing power they need, and one or two early systems of this type are already starting to appear.

Fred

MyRouteApp and Garmin work fine together but two points:

1) You need to make sure you export the file as GPX 1.0, not 1.1
2) Garmin use HERE maps so if you purchase the gold option for MyRouteApp you can change the maps from Google, Tomtom and HERE. You can also compare between them and make adjustments as required. Sometimes you need to add a waypoint or two to make it follow the route you want.

The Tomtom phone app is just as good as the dedicated GPS software.

I'll frequently bust the 29 waypoint limit the Nav V has with a planned route, done in Tyre. Auto recalculate is switched on so they recalculate when I import the GPX files into the trip planner. A route will also recalculate when you go off the planned route. Like for the new one way system in a French town I found on Thursday.

If you need to skip a waypoint for some reason, you can have a button on the screen to do it. Sure the Nav V has shortcomings, but generally it works well. Biggest ball ache I found this week is when you need to zap a set of waypoints due to time constraints. I can't find a way to easily identify a waypoint onscreen so it can then be zapped from the route.

ChazzyB said:

Auto recalculate is switched on so they recalculate when I import the GPX files into the trip planner.

Click to expand...

The problem doing this is there are different algorithms used by the mapping companies, so whilst you may have thought you had planned to ride on road A, Garmin may think road B is faster so will route you down the one it likes. This is especially true if you have no motorways set in my route app but you haven't checked the no motorways avoidance box on your Nav. To some extend you can avoid this by having more waypoints but as has been mentioned there is a limit to the amount you can have.

I have been fascinated with maps since I was a kid and one of the best parts of my trips is planning the route. I treat the Sat Nav as a dumb device (the Garmin is dumber than most!!) and it's there merely to guide me on the route I want to take. I could do it with a map only but 300 miles of back roads gets tiresome if you have to keep looking at it and frustrating if you're leading other bikes which I frequently do. Most of the problems people have with satnavs is they expect it to do too much, it's merely an aid to navigation. Back to the OP this is why A stand alone sat nav beats a phone (at the moment) Set it on 2D North up and on a GS with a whizz wheel you can zoom l in and out on the fly, know where you are at any given time, make route adjustments without having to alter your planned routing and all without stopping or removing gloves. Yes it takes practice, so get out and ride more!!

Tyre has a route tracks option, so what you get on a Garmin matches what you see in Tyre/Google maps. I don't use it...

ChazzyB said:

If you need to skip a waypoint for some reason, you can have a button on the screen to do it. Sure the Nav V has shortcomings, but generally it works well. Biggest ball ache I found this week is when you need to zap a set of waypoints due to time constraints. I can't find a way to easily identify a waypoint onscreen so it can then be zapped from the route.

Click to expand...

I've had similar problems and the Nav screen is not the best for lots of zooming in and out and scrolling around to find things. One good thing about the latest version of the MyRoute app is that now when you press the skip button it presents you with a list of waypoints and ask which one you want to go to next. Even if you haven't bothered to name them sensibly and therefore haven't a clue which one to aim for, it is very quick and easy to trying skipping to different ones until you find one which sends you forward along the route from your current location rather than back.

However for all satnavs I really don't understand why they can't be more informative. They know where you are, they know where the route is coming from and where it is going to, and they know where all the waypoints are. After missing a waypoint, why the hell can't they just highlight the next waypoint along the route and say you missed the last waypoint so I will proceed to the next one unless you cancel this action. In most cases the rider would then take the default action of going to the next waypoint and so no user input would be required.

fred_jb said:

They know where you are, they know where the route is coming from and where it is going to, and they know where all the waypoints are. After missing a waypoint, why the hell can't they just highlight the next waypoint along the route and say you missed the last waypoint so I will proceed to the next one unless you cancel this action. In most cases the rider would then take the default action of going to the next waypoint and so no user input would be required.

Click to expand...

The Zumo 550 would do that. If you missed a waypoint but got yourself back onto the pink route line, it would skip the missed point and carry on with the route. OTOH, if you had a route that crossed itself, you were in trouble. Or a route that starts and finishes at the same place...