39_Steps

I don't road route very often, either, but my casual observation is that I basically never bothered with my PN-40, but it's sufficient quick on my PN-60 that I do sometimes use it. (It actually does a better job than the nav system on my lovely driver's BMW, but that's not saying much.) One common example is that I'll road route while walking to the next cache to better understand which roads go through where. I know not to bother looking at my PN-60 while I wait for the route, but on the other hand, the route is normally calculated by the time I get to the first turn, although take into account that in that case, we're talking about routes of a mile or two with only a couple dozen roads in the area. On the other hand, I've run into a bad quirk on the PN-60 that I don't remember on the PN-40: if you tell it to road route, and then you get it into a situation where it thinks you're going the wrong way -- for example, if you decide not to go there after all -- it goes into a mode where it continuously recalculates and it becomes very hard to stop it. (Yes, there's a "stop calculating" button, but it doesn't break the cycle.) More than once, I've had to just power it down to get control again. Both the Delorme PN-40 and the PN-60 are capable of storing at least 32GB of the bundled (free)Topo/Road maps of North America. This amount of data can include almost the entire USA. However if more than 23GB are installed, even local road routing to points only a few miles away may fail as noted above. So for local geocaching it is better to limit total map storage somewhat if using the PN-40/60 for road routing. I have personally stopped in New Mexico, but not near Philmont, on cross country trips to delete a few unneeded states gigabytes of data to make road routing work reliably.

Suggestion: 1}While reposing on the couch, create a waypoint 50ft from each end of each and every street range to be plowed. Keep them in a separate GPX file by zone, if desired. Get your competitors to help. Name Waypoints adequately. Why 50ft minimum, but less than halfway? Routing. Also gps signal might be +/- 40 feet in blizzard. 2)[Edit]Include both of these two waypoints as Stops per street per route/trip. In some instances only One Stop per street will be required. Having named Stops at each end of each plowed street will make it easier to visualize missed streets in Route Directions. Minimize use of Waypoints (vias,stops) at intersections. Use mid-street wraparound placement of points instead. 3)[Edit] If you choose to try Delorme apps, please upgrade purchase to Topo10, Not SA. Topo is much more suitable for purposes of this thread. Topo10 has later file format. Topo 10 handles Garmin Base Camp and Nuvi GPX files better. [Edit]Nuvi 55 with Trip Planner is good for practice and for creating well named Stops on couch. Delorme Topo10 on desktop is much better in experienced hands. Topo's 100 Stops per route may suffice for up to 50 plowed streets per route. Nuvi's 29/30 Stops per "trip" will limit each "trip" to perhaps a dozen plowed streets. Garmin's Base Camp is still somewhat in Beta from what I have read, but I have little experience with it except as a GPX file conversion utility. Good luck again. Outa here on this forum on this topic, I hope.

Actually while that may have been true a while back most nuvis now come with trip planner so the number that can add more than one waypoint is ever increasing, although there are still a couple of newer ones for which that is true. @OP Provided you don't miss a turn it should be perfectly possible to do what you want with a nuvi. There is a limitation though of 30 (29?) waypoints in a 'trip' but you can also have many more shaping points. Seems to me like you have time to plan this so with a little pre-planning a nuvi should work for you. Thank you for the input Sussamb. I do have the latest Delorme Street Atlas 2014 as well a current Garmin Nuvi56 with Trip Planner. Both products are very good. I hope that the Original Poster saves $50 or so for the Delorme App bundled with a GPS USB receiver. Before the first snowflake falls, he may come to appreciate the Do Not Recalculate option in his snowplow cab.

There are some tricks for unambiguously adding the waypoint past the next turn point or two that will cut down on the total number of shape points required. Nonetheless, automatic route recalculation is undesirable for you purposes. But yes, what you hope to do is relatively easy with the right combination of computer apps, gps devices, and route file handling. Colorado might work with Basecamp to do what you need. Most Nuvis really cannot use more than one added waypoint per route. However the latest models with support of up to 29 strategically placed waypoints per "trip" could be very useful in a blizzard in conjunction with paper maps and local knowledge. Just be sure that you know the difference between the gps leading you and you leading the constantly recalculating gps.

Nuvis are not going to do the job because they are designed to re-calculate routes every time you miss a turn. No way to disable automatic recalculation. Zumos might work if they have ability to disable automatic recalculation of a multi shape point read only route created with an identical street vector map from BaseCamp. Same with Garmin handhelds, although you would lose audio typically. Delorme Street Atlas could do the job up to 100 added vias effortlessly. Delorme Topo would be much better due to added features, including features to send read only route files to Delorme's PN-60. Windows Computer required for audible turn by turn directions with Delorme. Ideal routing device on windshield would support turn by turn audible directions from a read only route containing many shape points, plus display a confidence building route line in field of view. Listen to Sussamb. His posts show pretty good knowledge of the Garmin product capabilities.

4" Android tablet/cell phone in pocket for turn by turn OSM voice directions, plus a mounted large screen computer tablet for wide but detailed display?

In general, a gps device that can be set to record track points in unthinned one (1) or two (2) second timed intervals can provide better data for later profiling analysis.

OSM Routing on a mobile phone is a completely different beast altogether. The mobile phone is most likely NOT using the Garmin IMG format or rendering engine. This particular discussion pertains to using OSM maps on a specific Garmin handheld device, which cannot have the routing engine swapped out. I have several OSM apps for my iPhone which work happily, and using OSM on a MacBook Pro also routes properly but that doesn't help the OP at all. Thank you for pointing out that this thread is device and data specific for the eTrex 30 only. My perhaps off topic post was intended only to suggest that some handheld devices may exhibit orderly automatic routing behavior for Pedestrians or Bicycles or Street Vehicles from available OSM data.

Very late to both the Android and OSM concepts, but in limited testing of OSMAND app on a Moto G cell phone used as a tablet, Pedestrian, Bicycle, and Automobile routing modes all work as they should on trails, bike paths, and roadways in one urban area I tried. Very impressive, even though I have not tried to figure out how it is done yet.

Keep in mind that the Delorme PN-40 and PN-60 devices cannot unzip a zip file containing a compressed gpx file on the device. The unzipping must be done on a Computer before copying the resultant uncompressed geocache *.gpx file onto either a PN-40 or PN-60 SD card Waypoints folder. An uncompressed gpx geocache file can also be copied into PN-60 EM_User Memory (internal)using the proprietary USB cable. PN-40 does not support gpx files in EM_User Memory. Unzipped *.gpx files may also be "imported" as Draw files into Delorme Topo8/9/10 and saved into proprietary native file format for later transfer back out as GPX files to the PN-40/60 devices. However it is not necessary to import the geocaches into Delorme Topo apps as an intermediate step.

Please explain to this non-scientist the relationship between recorded found caches and understanding the operation of a particular gps device.

I also have a cowboy anecdote regarding gps accuracy, but of a slightly different nature. I was driving westbound on a California (USA) multi-lane freeway in an area where many of the old cowboy western movies were once filmed. From time to time I glanced at the tracking on a Delorme PN-40 gps device. The device was not programmed to snap the display to the road or to a route. I was in the right hand (slow in the USA) lane next to the shoulder heading westbound as mentioned above, and the device seemed to be tracking the highway perfectly. Suddenly the track started veering to the south clear across all the lanes of the divided highway and then perhaps another 30 feet (10 meters) into the brush on the other side of the road. Just as quickly the track returned to its proper place in my westbound lane. What had happened, I wondered. Then I looked in the rear view mirror. Oh yeah, I had not even noticed that the highway had been cut through the slope of one of those old cowboy movie mountains so that we could all drive in a straight line. The satellite geometry at that point in time was such that said mountain caused major interference if only for a few seconds. Please, those of you who post data, please also post the location of various trees, canyons, and buildings potentially blocking satellites - even if it is only your own two story house shading your own back yard.

Here is a link to a view of a Topo contour map containing a profile view of a Central Pennsylvania trail on the computer. Similar contour maps views are also available with a bundled gps device if desired. (May currently be backordered). http://forum.delorme.com/index.php?/gallery/image/11-pa-pulpit-rock-trail-profile/

Has anyone tried getting rid of at least one of the decimal points (periods) in the alpha-numeric "E.T." cache name strings?

As a Delorme Topo software and Delorme PN-40/60 gps user, I had no experience with Garmin BaseCamp until a week or so ago. At that time I purchased a Garmin Nuvi 56 "essential" device to get audible "text to speech" road navigation in a small device for the car. This and other Groundspeak threads, as well as curiosity, caused me to install BaseCamp with the Nuvi 56 connected to the computer USB port for street map road vector unlocked access. Initial impression of BaseCamp was that it was rather nice to have a big bland map that was more like a paper atlas than Delorme's colorful Topo9. Then in BaseCamp I spotted the limited tracks, waypoints, and multi-point trip routes that had been created so far on the standalone Nuvi 56. I moused around for a while on the computer map and then closed BaseCamp. I had never intended to either update the Nuvi 56 maps even once, nor had I intended to ever upgrade the Nuvi firmware. Yesterday I did both, and got a few extra gigabytes of map data as a permanent installation for BaseCamp on the computer in the bundle. Comment: Yes, Delorme Topo is a "more powerful" app than BaseCamp. Yes, BaseCamp is a "more powerful" app than Delorme Topo. They complement each other and both are necessary to transfer GPX track, waypoint, and route files back and forth. So, if you need to send all Delorme PN-60 (or early firmware PN-40 in particular) device data files to a Garmin device or BaseCamp, you must first run those files through Delorme Topo for massaging and export. If you need to send Garmin Nuvi device data files to Delorme Topo and a Delorme PN device, you must first import the Nuvi gpx file into BaseCamp for massaging and export. Transferring the data both ways is really quite simple for experienced nerds.

Let's see what we have here: 1)A Delorme PN-40 device with 2.6 firmware. The 2.6 firmware was designed to give full featured Waypoint (Geocache), Track, and Route file data transfer only in proprietary format with the Delorme Topo8 application. 2) Delorme Topo8 is designed to be compatible with Windows7 at the latest, but the user has a new Win8 computer, presumably with the 8.1 upgrade. The user is likely not familiar with either the use of Topo8 or unzipped Groundspeak Pocket Queries in gpx format. 3) If the user is an active competitive geocacher, he is accustomed to forwarding his Finds back to Groundspeak for posting. No can do with MS Win8 and combined MS Internet Explorer 11 plus Groundspeak download/upload security gotchas. 4) User can try installing Delorme Topo8 on the Win8 computer so that Pocket Queries (Waypoints) in unzipped gpx format can be imported into T8 for transfer to the PN-40 internal memory in proprietary format. 5) Or user can download PN-40 2.9 firmware upgrade to the device. Then it would be possible to copy PQ files in unzipped gpx format directly to a folder named Waypoints on the removable SDHC memory card without using Delorme Topo8. That's just to get started searching for geocaches again. Perhaps an actual active geocacher will run across this semi-hidden message on this new forum by accident and give further instructions. Good luck.

First item on the Delorme PN-40 agenda is to determine the PN-40 firmware version. If the firmware is the older <2.5/2.6 version that originally was delivered with Delorme Topo8, you may have to make several changes to use the new Win8 computer. If you have PN-40 firmware version 2.8 or 2.9, and/or Topo9, the process of loading PQs as unzipped gpx files, to the SD card can be used. It is not possible to copy Waypoint(Geocache) PQ gpx files to the EM_User Memory area of PN-40 Internal Memory with Windows Explorer, as the process is unsupported in any mode in this device. So, find and post the firmware version for a start.

When one looks at the city limits boundaries (or maybe the zip codes) of both Rossford,OH and Sidney,OH in the more convenient Delorme Street Atlas App, one has to wonder if the urban street vectors are actually loaded and connected in the Monterra. If the street vectors are all present and accounted for, perhaps there is an Activities setting in the Monterra firmware that needs to be changed.

It turned out that someone slipped the new 2013/2014 Nuvi 56 in the mailbox yesterday, so I spent half a day today trying to figure out how to use a touch screen. Then after planning a trip of my own I managed to create a pair of two point routes from Rossford to Sidney and from Sidney to Rossford. City Center to City Center and back. Noticed no map issues that were not part of this user's learning curve. Good luck.

I checked the above routing in the latest Delorme 2014 Street Atlas version and found corrupted lat/lon coordinate values in one of two or three possible POIs for Rossford,OH routing. This caused the SA2014 to sometimes crash - in a manner that is most unusual for recent SA versions. Interesting, but probably irrelevant to the Monterra route selection at the destination coordinates of Sidney,OH city center. Upon further review of the Garmin Monterra data above, it seems that the Monterra may have taken a less than quickest route to the city limits of Sidney, at which point the city naming changed from Thompson-Schiff Rd to Broadway Avenue and then shifted to direct routing from city limits to the city center POI coordinates. Nah. Garmin wouldn't do that would they? Perhaps this is the result of some sort of Drive and Hike geocaching "feature" gone awry. Might come in handy sometimes. I have a 2014 Nuvi 55 "Essential/Basic" device without lifetime updates due for delivery in a couple of days. I'll check the routing on that device with original 2014 maps to see if anything similar occurs.

To further confuse, geotagging does not necessarily need to involve modifying the original image (i.e. jpg) file, either in the camera maker's exif fields or with appended/prepended meta data Photo Editor App hacks that can be very difficult to search for coordinates. Here is some info for the Delorme Topo Geotagger utility, as copied from the Topo9 User Guide. (Although gpx files are not directly mentioned, they are supported.) Getting Started with GeoTagger Use the GeoTagger Wizard to: Sync digital photos with GPS log files (.gpl) and track files (.an2) and tag them to the location you took them. You can place images as an actual image on the map, a MapNote with a hyperlink, or a symbol with a hyperlink. Match GPS logs and tracks to time-related information downloaded from supported devices. For example, you can download a track that includes your heart rate from an athletic device and view the data in the Profile tab. The program uses the following file formats: Suunto (*.sdf), Timex Trainer CSV (*.csv), or Generic CSV File (*.csv).

Bump to emphasize setting the Camera time to UTC, as the gpx track log points will probably be recorded in UTC (Zulu) time regardless of the gps device settings. Note: I totally missed EScout's reason for doing so on the first reading, because I have not been actively geotagging photos. This thread has made me think that I may start carrying a gps track recording device in my camera bag at all times - and use it. Then I might consider putting a copy of the dated track files in the "My Pictures" folder for future reference by my descendants. I'm certain that I will never get around to editing the image file exif data fields myself.

You may want to consider taking a picture of the Time display on the gps, whichever brand/model is in use, at least once a day for future offset reference. Edited: I just looked at a recent gpx track file from a Delorme PN-60 gps device in Wordpad. It seems that the time is already recorded in Zulu time,and incremental speed of travel is also shown for each point. Speed seems to be in meters/sec,although my setting was in Miles/feet. Time display was set to display for local time zone in USA, not UTC. So a little practice before the trip might be a good idea.

If you live in California, USA, the reason may be related to Panasonic and Sanyo getting into a little dust-up/lawsuit/merger shortly after the original Eneloops were released. Or it could be just an agreement (wink, wink) between big box stores to throttle the availability of these popular rechargeable cells..

Netlink downloads from Delorme are a more than fair value at the price, but given your sense of urgency for the next "couple" of weeks IMHO you should postpone even thinking about the process until your return from your trip.