rickertk
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Everything posted by rickertk
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Alternatively, if you're talking about a full saved route, select the route in question, then click on the "Navigate" button. Keith
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Etrex Legend And Mapsource City Select Na Nt 7
rickertk replied to ozymandiasism's topic in GPS technology and devices
With respect to the OP's question, I think some of the answers here have missed the letters NT in his software description. I believe the NT maps will not load correctly into units that do not support them, which would include the older legend. So while City Select NA (non-NT) could be loaded onto a Legend (albeit not supporting autorouting), I don't think you'd even get that far with the NT version - I think that comes with some of the newer Streetpilots, and probably can't be loaded onto many of the handheld units. Keith -
Hiking Trails > Track Or Routes?
rickertk replied to planewood's topic in GPS technology and devices
On the VistaC, and I'm guessing the 60c/cs/cx/csx, track display and color for saved tracks can be turned on/off individually. However, if you want the GPS to be giving you guidance on a path, you want to organize your points as a route. As I said above, I don't want the GPS giving me guidance on a MTB ride, I just want display so I organize things as tracks. There are some software tools to turn tracks into routes automatically and you'll need to limit the number of points to 250 or lower within a route, if I understand the specs. for your unit. Keith -
Hiking Trails > Track Or Routes?
rickertk replied to planewood's topic in GPS technology and devices
I have a few questions, and a few possible suggestions. Are all of your 100 trails completely different, non-intersecting trails in totally different areas? If they are, then it would be hard to combine them. If not, then you might be able to combine some of your trails into a single saved track and use that. I've just started doing this this spring, using Topofusion and Mapsource (yay for the new track editing tools) to put together trail maps as tracks for the areas I MTB ride in. Secondly, do you just want the trails to display on the map, or do you want directional guidance out of them? Saved tracks are always displayed on the map. Routes, however, are only displayed when actively navigating, and this kind of sounds like what you are looking for. I can elaborate a bit on either approach if you want,. but it's easier if we know what you're trying to accomplish. Personally, what I want is a rough map of the trails in the area while I'm riding, and maybe a few indications for things like muddy, dangerous, or difficult sections. I don't necessarily want to repeat a previous ride, but I do want to see when I'm at a junction what my options are and where they lead. I'm using saved tracks because it's easier; overlaid maps would be a better solution to the problem but I haven't found it necessary to put in the time to figure out the details for myself yet. I've been using Topofusion to average the trails together and create a network, and then editing those into a single track again in Mapsource. I can then filter this to below the 500 point saved track limit, make sure it preserved the most important details, and send it to the unit. Keith -
I seem to remember someone else having a similar problem (tracks starting with an arbitrary point in the middle of the ocean), and was instructed to do a hard reset of the unit which fixed it. If your issue recurs, then I would try the same. Keith
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Ok, I think I understand what you're looking for better now. With the existing firmware, you can't change the route while navigating (except by driving it). You can add via points to a route, either by clicking on the map or by address, but they only add to the end of the route, so it's harder to add points in the middle of a route. You could (when easier) build a route starting from the destination, add points backwards, and then reverse the route also. This is all things I've been able to do on my VistaC directly (not using Mapsource). It's not quite as powerful as the route editing within Mapsource, but it can be useful, and it's not at all well documented in the manual. Keith
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Can you explain in a little more detail what it was you were doing on the GPS V? I ask because I've created several routes with numerous via points on the similar VistaC unit, no computer involved. It's a mode that isn't really described in the documentation, and it may not be what you're looking for - which is why I'm asking. I haven't played around too much with this, as most of the time I can set up routes in Mapsource, which is always easier. BTW, there is a "Select all maps around route" menu option within Mapsource that may help if you're having a problem with that. Keith
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In the active tracklog, it's 10,000 points free and clear - no other data impinges on it as far as I've been able to tell. You also have the capacity on the unit to "save" the active tracklog - the unit has an additional capacity for up to 20 saved tracks, with up to 500 points each. "Saving" the tracklog on the unit basically transfers the complete active tracklog to a single saved track, strips out time/speed data, and filters it down to 500 or fewer points. Because of this filtering, it's not really a great method to capture the best data for long term use. However, if you are running out of room and you're about to lose data otherwise, this does give you some additional capacity on the unit itself for simplified data. Keith
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Why Is Mapsource's Autorouting So Stupid?
rickertk replied to TeamHardK's topic in GPS technology and devices
A few comments: First of all, routing for bicycles will mostly keep you off limited access highways, where bicycles are not legal for the most part. (I think someone - peter? - has indicated that this is the case even for those stretches of highways where bicycles are legal). I'm not sure about preferring minor roads. Second of all, I'm not aware of any online map product with enough info to set "preferred" bicycle routes - there are so many factors going into that - width of shoulder, speed/amt. of traffic, etc. Third, if you have an idea of an alternate road you want to follow, you can set via points in Mapsource and it will follow that. This has the added benefit for autorouting GPSr's that the via points transfer to your GPS; with more via points, the Mapsource and GPSr routes will be more similar; with fewer via points, they may calculate different routes. There are some rare situations that can occur that will play havoc with routes, such as roads that are "broken" within the map data, but I'd only suspect this is a problem if routing looks wacky even with a lot of via points. Finally, I'll say that I think that Mapsource/City Select NA (which I have) does a lot better job of this than DeLorme TopoUSA - with Mapsource, once I have the route following a road, it usually sticks to it until forced to turn. With DeLorme, the software will very often try to redirect me to a parallel road that I find less acceptable for bicycling. Keith -
Custom Turn By Turn Possible W/dr And Exploist 500?
rickertk replied to Team 5150's topic in GPS technology and devices
I can confirm that with Garmin CitySelect, you can set up turn by turn directions as explicitly as you like. I do this regularly to set up bicycle rides for my wife when she doesn't know the route as I do, or when I'm trying a route I don't know myself but have a cue sheet for. Keith -
Trying To Decide Between The 60cx Or The 60csx.
rickertk replied to aceshadow's topic in GPS technology and devices
I've got the VistaC, so it's not quite identical but similar. I suspect the Sight'n'Go may not be as accurate as you want, although I haven't tried it myself. The compass on the VistaC is fairly susceptible to tilt, which limits what can be achieved here. I'm not sure if the 60csx compass has improved on this compared to the earlier generation models. The thing I wanted in the VistaC was the altimeter; even though I have another altimeter, this has the advantage of recording those altitudes in the track log, so I can go back and look through the data in detail. Keith -
Trying To Decide Between The 60cx Or The 60csx.
rickertk replied to aceshadow's topic in GPS technology and devices
Strictly speaking, you only need to calibrate the compass when you want to use it. If you don't use it frequently, then don't calibrate it every time you change batteries, just calibrate when you actually want to use it. The altimeter can be set to auto-calibrate based on GPS elevation, which I have found to be quite satisfactory. I've seen enough spikes from GPS elevation tracklogs to know that the barometric altimeter gives much smoother, more realistic elevation data and relative climb data, and the auto-calibration does a pretty good job at keeping that elevation accurate in the absolute sense. I'm not trying to push one model over the other - if you don't have any use for either feature, don't spend the money. However, I don't think that the effort of doing the calibrations (which I think is pretty minimal) is a good reason to forego the compass or altimeter. Keith -
Altitude Calibration Question For 76cs
rickertk replied to dhbaird's topic in GPS technology and devices
Probably not. However, it won't last particularly long. Barometric altimeters tend to drift with changes in the air pressure as weather systems come and go. If the 76cs is anything like the 60cs and VistaC (which I have), under the Setup>Altimeter menu, you have the chance to turn Auto Calibration on, which tries to regularly autocalibrate to GPS altitude to compensate for air pressure changes. Calibrating to a benchmark is a good way to measure the altitude of another location with fairly high accuracy, soon afterwards. If you measure the altitude of, say, your home, you can regularly calibrate to a reasonably well determined position. Keith -
A few other answers: 1) The first time it's powered on, letting it sit somewhere with a good view of the sky for 15-30 mins or so is usually recommended. If you don't have a position lock by 30 minutes, something is probably wrong. Once it's got a good position lock, you don't need to let it sit any longer. 3) Neither the USB nor the 12V will recharge batteries in the unit, but they will power the unit, and so sparing the battery life. You can of course buy 12V powered AA battery chargers. 5) I don't have an x-series Garmin, but judging by what I've seen others post, a card reader is certainly not necessary. (It might be useful, but that's another matter). However, in the unit, it won't act like a card plugged into a card reader - you don't get a disk mounted for example. But mapsource/POI loader can certainly talk to the card while in the unit. Keith
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Acquiring Satellites While Moving?
rickertk replied to dhbaird's topic in GPS technology and devices
I just have to say, I've rarely had a problem re-acquiring lock while moving on a bicycle - but there there's not the issue of a vehicle roof, and I've usually been riding in situations without tall obstructions. (Lock usually lost from power off, either from excessive vibration or low battery voltage in cold weather). I've only once lost lock otherwise while riding (narrow deep valley + poor satellite geometry), and even then reacquisition was fairly quick once I moved a short distance. If you lost lock because you were in a situation with poor reception to start with, by definition reacquisition will be difficult unless something changes to improve your reception. Keith -
You may or may not have done anything wrong. I'm assuming that you're using a routing mapset such as City Select/City Navigator. Under normal operations, when you plan a route in Mapsource, the only thing that is sent to the unit is the individual waypoints that make up that route, not all turns and roads between route points. The unit will recalculate the route from those same waypoints, which can give you a different result. However, there are also some user errors that can result in similar symptoms. Things to check: 1) You are using a mapset such as CS/CN that supports routing on the unit. 2) You've sent the appropriate maps, including routing data, to the unit. 3) Routing preferences, such as vehicle type or shortest vs. fastest route, are set similarly between Mapsource and the unit. 4) You can try setting the unit preference to best routes, rather than quickest calculated. If all of those are correct, and you still get differences, you could try to plant more waypoints along the route while planning it, to force a particular preference; you could just drive the route as Mapsource calculated it - eventually the unit will recalculate to use the roads you're on, or just go with the unit suggested route. Keith
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Before the X series, I would have suggested GPSbabel. When I got my VistaC a year ago, it was the only piece of Mac software that would communicate with it. I never used the MacGPSbabel wrapper much; I had more flexibility from the command line. If you have another piece of software to put GPS data into, that can import/export GPX files, that should be all you'll need. Keith
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Inventory Time> What GPS Units Do You Own ?
rickertk replied to GOT GPS?'s topic in GPS technology and devices
Only GPSr I've ever owned (and current one): eTrex Vista C. It's been a great unit for me. Keith -
I haven't used nRoute, so I can't address most of your issues. However, it's clear that magnetic orientation data can't be meaningfully used in nRoute - the compass on the GPSr can only tell you which way that unit is facing. Given that the GPSr could be oriented very differently from the laptop, there's not really much point in sending that data. Keith
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I've been using my GPSr to collect tracks from bike rides for about a year now, and for MTB rides, I've been trying to roughly map out the parks I ride in and put those tracks back onto the GPSr for reference on future rides. I've just downloaded and tested out the make trail network feature of TopoFusion, and it's definitely neat - a nice way to average and smooth out tracks and combine them into a coherent network. I still have to play around with the various settings and optimize for some of the parks I ride in, and if I just wanted to make paper maps, the full registered version I think would probably do everything I want. However, the problem comes in wanting to send tracks back to the GPSr. Topofusion basically splits everything up into individual trail segments, which would allow the most flexibility in putting things together, but it means that for one park I tried, I have something like 80 tracks for the one park, which won't fit on the GPSr. I'd like to put this together into a small number of tracks(pref. 1) to upload to the GPSr, but in some kind of semi-automated way. I'm looking for two things - any ideas on algorithms to do this, and any ideas on tools that might help with some of this. For example, I know GPSbabel can put tracks together, but I have to put these segments together in some sort of structured order so I don't get random interconnecting lines all over the place. Any ideas/discussion welcome. Keith
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Averaging the coordinates directly doesn't work if you're covering a large area of the globe (or if your coordinates happen to be near a transition point between W and E). For example, at high latitudes, a given E-W distance covers many more degrees of longitude than it does at the equator. If your coordinates are over a relatively small area (say, primarily in one state of the US), then the deviation between the sphere and a plane is relatively small, and just averaging the coordinates would give you some kind of approximation. It might not be exactly right, but it'd probably be close enough to be reasonable. As fizzymagic points out, you could calculate Cartesian coordinates and get an average that way, which would almost certainly be below the surface of the earth, and then look at the point above it. I'm not up enough on spherical geometry to know how to do a deterministic calculation of the center of mass, but such a calculation can probably be done. An alternative would be an empirical solution, as long as you can calculate a distance on the surface of the sphere between any two points. I think I prefer fizzymagics earlier suggestion of minimizing the sums of the squares of the distances between the center point and the outer points - if you use the squares, that resolves the problem of finding the center with just two points. You could either calculate gradients empirically and use a Marquardt type algorithm, or use something more simplistic (but with likely higher calculation cost) like a Metropolis type minimization. The Marquardt methods would probably work much more quickly, as I doubt the calculation surface has a significant local minimum issue for most problems. Two antipodal points would likely be problematic.
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When you save the active track on the GPSr (my experience is with the VistaC), it will automatically filter the track length down to below 500 points. (It also strips out the timestamp data). You won't see gaps or truncations, but the track will be coarser than the original active track. I personally use the "saved tracks" to have rough maps of previous trips (MTB rides) to an area, but I'll download the original active tracklog to the computer with it's full detail. Some of these get filtered and sent back to the GPSr for use on future trips. Keith
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Some people are most interested in absolute elevation. If you need this, then yes, a barometric altimeter needs frequent recalibration. If you don't need a high degree of precision then GPS altitude probably is good enough. For me, I'm most interested in relative elevation. When I'm at the top of a hill, how many feet have I climbed? How much climbing was in this ride relative to others? I've found that barometric altimeters, even without calibration, can give this answer very stably. I haven't had a track with GPS altitude only to compare to my VistaC, but judging by comments like Geoff's above, it probably won't be as nice and might either miss smaller hills or create them where there are none. As is true of many other things, a lot depends on what your intended use and expectations are. I can't see the altimeter being useful for geocaching per se most of the time. Keith
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Metroguide -vs- City Select -vs- City Navigator (76csx)
rickertk replied to toddm's topic in GPS technology and devices
Mapsource is the core program that runs on the PC, and you have separate mapsets such as Metroguide, Topo, etc. that exist within it. As to auto-routing with Metroguide: there are two things that may be confusing you. The most important distinction is between auto-routing on the PC, within Mapsource, which all recent versions of Metroguide-NA will do, and auto-routing on the GPS itself with maps loaded, which Metroguide won't do for versions > 4. Keith -
Have you tried it without auto-zoom on? I ask because I think the issue is more one of the unit's idea of the correct scale for navigating is different than your idea, rather than the unit is having a defect per se. At least with my VistaC, using primarily Follow Road navigation with CS6/7, the zoom level is usually enough to show the whole route right after a recalculate, but it generally zooms in a lot for turns, and then zooms back out a fair distance (but not all the way). If it stayed at the display the whole route scale most of the time, I'd never see any of the roads that I'm actually on. If the maps/navigation you're using are very different, though, then whatever it's using to calculate an appropriate scale may be off. Keith