At the moment the issue i have is as follows
You are navigating a preloaded route from basecamp
You stop the route for whatever reason then you restart it
The only options you have on the XT are these
closest entry point
start
or a waypoint along the route
That is not unique to the XT, it is present on my Nav V and VI and, for all I know, on the majority of new or fairly recent Garmin devices.
If you have no waypoints along the route it will only give you the option to go to the start or finish
select either of these anf it will recalculate a route to whatever you select ( original route gone )
Again, that is typical of all new Garmin devices. That being said, I can create an A to B route from my home to say, Coventry, fire up my device, be faced with just the two A and B choices, select B and ride the unrecalculated route quite happily. That assumes of course that I was at home when I started the route in the first place. If I wasn’t at home and I selected B, the device would by default (and by intended design) take me from where I was to B, in accordance with my preference settings. In other words, it would do exactly what I had asked it to do, which was: “Take me, from where I am now, to B”. What it will not do is create me a route to take me to from where I am now to some point on my created route and then pick up my own route from there.
However, what you have seen (and how it works) is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. Here is an example of what I mean. I live in central London. Let’s say I create a route in BaseCamp (using shaping points only) that starts in Calais to finish in Bordeaux, with no waypoints between A and B. I can fire up the route at my front door, whereupon the device will give me the option to navigate to either A, Calais or B, Bordeaux. If I select A, it will straight away automatically tack an additional section onto my self-created route, taking me from home to A, routed according to my preference settings. As I have not many preference settings set, I will guess that will be down the M20 to Folkestone to the train (or Dover for the boat) and then to A. When I get precisely to A, my self-created route will then start to run automatically
from that point with no alterations at all. This is quite a good feature for bods who know where they want a route to start from and where they want it to end, but not necessarily knowing where they will be when they need to run the route. A good example might be: “I plan to spend the night before in Calais, but I don’t know where exactly. I will put point A, on the road I want to take
out of Calais”. That way, from wherever they are, their device will take them to point A and their self-made route will run perfectly thereafter.
I use this trick, even if I know exactly where I will be the night before. I will create my route in BaseCamp, starting from my known hotel. I will then put in a waypoint say five miles away, that I know is on a road I want to take. This way, when I start the day, I can select it from the list, knowing that the device will take me there, no matter what, and that my self-made route will run automatically and properly from there onwards. It’s a trick I had never thought of, despite years of Garmin gps use, picked up from a thread on UKGSer. I find it works well.
( you would think as soon as you rejoined the route it would just carry on as if you did not leave it like most other Garmin devices but it does not )
Again, not something unique to the XT. As I said in an earlier post, despite the bigger processors on the newer Garmins, it can take them a while to realise you have rejoined a route. By choice, I have auto-recalculate turned off. If I ride off the magenta line, say to pop into a town for a coffee I hadn’t planned on going into (so it wasn’t on my self-made route) or going into a petrol station. When I rejoin my route, it sometimes takes my V and VI a while to realise I am back on the magenta line, heading in the right direction, again. I notice only because the turn by turn instructions will cease (I don’t use voice) and all I’ll see displayed is ‘Navigate to.....’ then suddenly, with no prompting at all from me, the routing instructions will suddenly spring into life again, the next turn indicator displayed in the top left corner of the screen, as normal. This brief ( it can sometimes be a mile or so, I guess) glitch does not cause the route to recalculate; it can’t as I have recalculate turned off. If I didn’t have it turned off, then logically it would recalculate but only within the parameters of my preference settings and only as far as the next shaping point. So confident am I as to how this works I sometimes, as I ride along, stop a route and restart it. Useful only if the device freezes, a very, very rare occurrence.
You can navigate to a route without running it at all. Let’s go back to my A to B, Calais to Bordeaux example. Let’s pretend that I created this route a year ago, never used it but it was still on my device. Let’s pretend then that I am somewhere in France, say midway between A and B but 10 miles off the route but wanted to go to Bordeaux and use the route I had created. If I just fired it up I would be presented with A and B, but I don’t want to go straight to either.... I want to pick up MY one year old route, midway. I would display the route on the screen but not not run it, in other words I would not push ‘GO’. I would then just use the device like a paper map, with a magenta line highlighted on it. I would find a road (or roads) that looked likely to take me to the magenta line. When I hit the line, was pointing in the right direction, I would then run my self-made route from there. 99 times out of 100 this will work perfectly, trust me.
There are other things you can do, too. You could display the route, tap on it at a convenient spot, create a waypoint at that spot and insert it into your route. Then, when you fire up the route you’d have three choices: A, your original start, a new B your freshly created waypoint and C, your original end point. Choose, B and all will be good. I just find it easier to just navigate to the route, as described in the paragraph above. Others will differ, that is the ‘p’ of personal coming into play.
Spending some time in the GPS section has taught me that bods have all sorts of ways of doing things, as it suits them. That is fine, if it works for them, great. But, everyone needs to understand at least the basic fundamentals of how the new devices work, as they are not any longer just plug-n-play, unless you just want the device to do everything for you (where is Nutty) which it will do with incredible ease. For example, the important difference between waypoints and shaping points, as you have discovered. We see exactly the same when bods create routes directly on their devices, for example London to St Albans to Bedford to Northampton to Leicester, via Rugby. They summon up the towns and the device creates the route for them, exactly matching their preference settings. Absolutely no thought required at all by the owner of the device. Excellent so far. They then moan when they discover that the route takes them to the middle of each town, when “Any idiot would take the ring road”. Yes, any idiot would, except their idiot device was only doing exactly as it had been told to do, “Take me to the waypoint I created at St Albans.... Bedford..... Northampton....” The poor dumb device is not a mind reader (yet) so it does just as it has been told to do. Just as you found out, when it kept taking you backwards to pass through your waypoint, 50 metres off the route.