part way along a saved route, stop the route then restart it. A problem....

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Routing tested out now and it's still far from working properly :blast
Next update with a bit of luck
 
Are you testing this out on the road with an actual route of some distance or in simulation mode only?

There was an optimistic post reporting that the device was working as you expected it should after the update, a week ago. What has gone wrong? What has improved? What is it still not yet doing perfectly?

At the moment you seem to be the only person testing the device. Any fuller information you can provide will, I am sure, be helpful to other early owners of this new device.

Thank you.
 
Here is a problem i have seen on mine
Plot a route in base camp with the same map and profile selected
Transfer it to the unit and start to navigate the route
All goes well until you find you have put a waypoint 50 meteres off the road so you don't get to it ( you just drive past )
The XT sometimes / often won't route you to the next waypoint on the route it just keeps trying to take you to the one you have just missed
No matter what you do ( i can't find a way to sort this out ) the route is not running correctly after this happens
Cancel the route and restart it and the chances are you will not get the route you planned it will recalculate it...But not allways
It depends how close you are to a route waypoint
Just put a destination in the unit and it works fine

Also if you stop the route ( to find a fuel station as a example )
When you try and restart it and use the jump in at nearest point option it will just screw the route you planned up
But not always if you move a mile down the road it might then work but there again it might not
It's just got a mind of it's own and for this at the moment the XT gets a big no no from me :blast
 
Your first issue with the wanting to route you back to a missed waypoint, is it actually a waypoint or shaping point ?, if waypoint this will happen if shaping point it should ignore and carry on, so if it is a waypoint as you say, change it.

A waypoint is an instruction telling the route it must take you there no matter what unless you intervene, as in skip or ignore.
 
All goes well until you find you have put a waypoint 50 meteres off the road so you don't get to it ( you just drive past )
The XT sometimes / often won't route you to the next waypoint on the route it just keeps trying to take you to the one you have just missed
No matter what you do ( i can't find a way to sort this out )

OK, that should be easy to sort out. You have told us you have put a waypoint, not a shaping point, somewhere along your A to B route. If that is it, then here’s why:

A. It matters not if the waypoint is 50 metres off a road or on a road. If you miss it out, the device will keep trying its very best to take you to that point

B. A waypoint is an electric point (a beacon if you like) that you have told the dumb device you MUST go through. Most commonly they are used to navigate in deserts or on featureless oceans. That is why it is taking you back, so the device can obey you command (given to it when the route was created) that you must pass through it in order to continue onwards

If it had been a simple shaping point, used to drag and pin a route onto a specific road (or 50 metres into a field) it wouldn’t. You may well get an ‘off route’ notice flash up (you told us that you have auto-recalculate turned off) which, logically, you can just ignore.

As to ‘sorting it out’, you can convert waypoints into shaping points and visa-versa from within BaseCamp or from within most Garmin modern devices themselves. See threads on how to do this. Alternatively, most modern devices have a ‘Skip waypoint’ option. Some odd things can happen when this is pushed as the device will recalculate the route from where you are to the next waypoint (or end point) ahead. This recalculation will, by default, be made according to your preference settings. If there is only one road, you probably wouldn’t notice it happen. If there are several alternatives, you might well see a difference.


As to the rest of post #24.....


You keep telling us that the XT is not behaving itself. From your description above and from earlier ones it is behaving itself (in its own peculiar way) and has been all along. It is working just as my Nav VI and Nav V, both comparatively modern devices, do. Look at past posts in the Nav V and VI sections, you’ll see just the same scenarios and user frustrations playing out. We don’t see so many of them now as people have got used to using them. There are all sorts of ways you can navigate onto a route that you have stopped and restarted, all of them reliable. They were explained to you earlier in this thread, along with other offered of help but you rejected them, determined that your device was malfunctioning or needed a software update. Several people doubted this but their advice fell on deaf ears.

Tip 1. Do not use a waypoint unless you really must go through that point

Tip 2. Don’t place waypoints (or indeed shaping points) 50 meters off the road, unless you want to go there

Tip 3. Use shaping points (not waypoints) to shape and pull the magenta line to where you want it to go

Tip 4. Read up about the ‘skip waypoint’ facility, assuming the XT features it. I’d be surprised if it didn’t

Tip 5. Don’t shout at the device, it can’t hear you

Tip 6. Don’t shout at people who, with the best of intentions, have tried to help you since your opening post

Your round...

:beerjug:
 
Hi Garry,

A good while back I did some testing using a Navigator 6. The tests pertained to exactly the issue you experienced - deviating from a route mid-way, returning to the route and being able to follow the route as originally designed. I explored three scenarios where this might occur - have a look here for more details...

https://www.ukgser.com/forums/showthread.php/475006-More-post-4-90-update-testing

I know the behaviours I found relate to the Nav6 and not the XT, but the results were found AFTER the update to version 4.90 of the firmware. Would be interesting to see if the XT behaves in the same way after the latest update you have applied to it. The newer (and supposedly smarter) devices make it more difficult to blindly follow a pre-designed route in the same way as the likes of the Zumo 550 did, but hopefully by exploring what they do in certain situations, we can at least predict how they will behave before heading off on our epic bike tours...:thumb2

Hope this helps (even a little),
Seán.
 
Here is a problem i have seen on mine
Plot a route in base camp with the same map and profile selected
Transfer it to the unit and start to navigate the route
All goes well until you find you have put a waypoint 50 meteres off the road so you don't get to it ( you just drive past )
The XT sometimes / often won't route you to the next waypoint on the route it just keeps trying to take you to the one you have just missed
No matter what you do ( i can't find a way to sort this out ) the route is not running correctly after this happens

Hey Garry, Always check your waypoints & shaping points in Basecamp before you transfer the route, this is crucial.
Once the route is built in Basecamp in the lower left hand pane will be all your waypoints and the route, double click the route and a window will pop up listing your waypoints and shaping points within the route from start to finish.
Double click each waypoint/shaping point and Basecamp will give you a view on where each one is placed in relation to road or junction.

If a few are like you described 50 feet/meters off the road there is an editing tool to move the point onto the road without changing your route.
It takes a little extra time but saves so much pain.
 
Thanks for the input boys :beerjug:
I will try the same using only shaping points not a mixture of both like i do with my montana and 276cx
The 276cx and the montana do not exhibit this problem and handle routes from basecamp far better than the XT
They also let you jump into a route at any point without recalculating it and for me this is a big issue
 
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Now we are cooking on gas :thumb Problem one resolved.

You can jump onto a route without recalculating it. Similarly you can, mid-route, include a deviation off to a petrol station without altering the planned route too fundamentally.
 
You can not jump onto a route without recalculating it
But sometimes you can it depends where you are and it should not
Put a deviation in and you won't have the same route you started with :blast
 
You can not jump onto a route without recalculating it
But sometimes you can it depends where you are and it should not
Put a deviation in and you won't have the same route you started with :blast

yes you can
 
Sorry for the late reply

Garry in your own words you say, But sometimes you can it depends where you are and it should not, so it will sometimes let you join a route part way along, so what is different to when it wont, is there something in the actual make up of the route that at the particular point you enter something is different, are you doing something different as in turning the nav off or on or giving it different instructions, or could it be a faulty gps, doubtfull but not impossible.
It may help if you can better explain what steps you take after leaving the route and before rejoining, do you turn the unit off how is it set, do you tell it to take you back to a certain spot along the route, do you do nothing, Its impossible without actually being there to give you an answer on whats going wrong, but the more info we have the better chance of sorting this out, it may be helpfull to post up a copy of the route on drop box .

Trust me and many others on here that say it can be done (it can). Did changing the waypoints to shaping points have any effect ?
 
How ?
Because i can't get it to work on the XT

Try saying please, please. This thread was ripped out of a general “Oooh, it’s the new XT” thread, just to help you, don’t forget.

From the early days of this thread your angry rejection of any advice that did not come from an XT owner (advice that - when you’d furnished more details - subsequently turned out to be correct) has been clear to read. Let’s start by saying that if you are expecting your XT to behave exactly like your other Garmins or previous devices you have owned, you may be in for some surprises and, who knows, maybe some disappointments. In short, you may be on a learning curve where, inevitably, operator error creeps in. I, like others (and you) am pretty competent with Garmin devices in general but was wrong footed when the Nav V appeared, simply because it did not behave at all like my earlier devices. I made operator errors, too. But, with patience, some very good help from the forum (and other sources) and some patient learning on the hoof, I came to understand it.

Let’s also start by agreeing that the latest Garmin devices are primarily designed to cater for the vast mass of users who do not plot their own routes in BaseCamp (or any other software) at all. The owner’s handbook of the XT gives pretty clear instructions aimed at these owners, including how to make the device give them a route, how to use waypoints and shaping points, how to use preference settings, how to use avoidances, how to chose ‘windy’ (or whatever it’s called) routes, how to start and stop a route and how to deviate from a route successfully. In short, the latest devices will do everything these owners want it to do, all from within the device itself, all in accordance with the owner’s preference settings, straight out the box. In fact, your XT has some additional functions that I do not recall as being present on my Nav VI, all aimed at making the XT more useful to the most common user. If you can accept all that and cut down on the aggression, we’ll all be in a better place.

Next, try to stop working through scenarios in route simulation. I appreciate you probably can’t get out to ride your bike and use your device as you’d like to but that’s just life at the moment. Simulation is not a perfect tool, at least not in my experience. Similarly, trying to make the XT do something that other Garmin devices can apparently do, is very possibly not going to work. Accept that too, please.

Have you looked at Hatcho’s advice on things he found whilst learning to use his Nav VI? OK, it is not an XT, but he (like me) would be surprised if your XT functions very differently. Have you tried the method of navigating onto a self-made route, without running it first, doing the equivalent of “Please navigate to highlighted route? It works for me and I’m reasonably confident I could use it on an XT but it may not work for you. That is because the latest devices are all but personal computers, with the emphasis on the ‘p’ for personal. There are also other methods you can use, including the deliberate insertion of say a petrol station midway into a self-made, BaseCamp created, running route. Trust me on that, please.

So, can your device do what you say is impossible or because you say it needs another software update? Yes it very probably can, straight out of the box. It can also do much more, especially when used in conjunction with BaseCamp. It is incredibly powerful but, in some ways, not as user friendly or intuitive as earlier devices. Indeed, it can sometimes be frustratingly dumb, little better than a plastic box of widgets.... but, more often than not, incredibly clever too. That is progress and almost human.
 
Hi thanks for the replies
The issue could be that i am using a mixture of way points and shaping points
I need to check this out using only shaping points
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

closest entry point is the one that should put you back on the route ( 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 )
but even with the route recalculation turned off the XT will sometimes recalculate the route...But not always
move a a bit and it will behave differently

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 )

I am going to create 2 routes local to me and ride them on my mountain bike
one with shaping point the other with a mixture and see what happens later
Because as Wapping says you cant trust the simulator
will report back
 
Thanks Garry all good info, so as i understand it (correct me if i am wrong) you are traveling the route and for whatever reason you stop the route, you then move off the route to whatever distance, and then decide to restart the route to get you back to the origonal route (is this correct) if so why have you stopped the route ?, why not just let it run with no recalculation ? (you could then navigate back to the route using the nav screen as a map, its just another way of doing it)
Ok you choose closest entry point what happens?
You choose start, i can guess what happens there, it routes you back to the start using the navs own settings
You choose waypoint along the route, now i guess what happens hereis it does not take you there as you would expect it to, instead it now gives you a route to the nearest waypoint and then sometimes alters the route from there to the end. Is that correct. I am using the term guess because i cant actually see whats happening with your unit.

Quote (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 ) ) This is what i would expect it to do, and its what you have tinstructed it to do it to do.

Quote (I am going to create 2 routes local to me and ride them on my mountain bike
one with shaping point the other with a mixture and see what happens later
Because as Wapping says you cant trust the simulator
will report back ) good idea. Wapping is bang on with his statement with reference simulation mode. just a thought Garry are you going off road as in accross fields or where no known roads are.

Get back with progress.
 
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.
 
Garry, I think I and Lee, along with some of the others, are both coming to the same advice and conclusions. Which is at least encouraging, I hope. I really do think that none of what you are seeing or understandably being frustrated with is unique to your XP in particular or the device as a whole. Be patient. You will crack it, trust me.

Await your words.
 
Ok boys tests done... ( just riding on roads )
I problem solved one remaining

If you use a waypoint at the start and end and shaping points for all the other that cures the fixation on taking you to a waypoint
So you can navigate the route fine

But here is the problem that using shaping points creates if you stop the route for any reason ( to find somthing or lets say overnight if you are on a trip )
You are stuffed because you have lost the option of navigate to closest entry point
You can only navigate to start or finish and your well planned route is gone !

You don't get the option to navigate to highlighted route until you have started the route and thats too late it's already recalculated it

The only work around i can find at the moment is to turn the route into a track in base camp
Then trasfer the track to the XT
Then use the option of create route from a track on the XT
That gives you a lot of points along the route and there is a good cahnce you will be close enough to one when you restart it to use closest entry point

Maybe the XT works a bit different to other units that's why you need to play with one to see what is going on
The one thing for sure it is one of the worst Garmin unit i have used for navigating a pre planned route and unless some one can tell me how to solve it or Garmin sorts it in firmware to me the XT is not good for
plotting routes say for a holiday and hoping to follow what you have planned

I have had a few suggestions on how to sort this and i have tried them all and none work on the XT...Plus my own ideas from a lot of experience with garmin units
I.E the 276cx and that is far more complicated to use than the XT and i have that well sussed

Still open to suggestions though :beerjug:
 
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