Strange behaviour to follow a route GPSMap 66S

[Kevin Kicks]

I'm trying to help a friend with a GPSmap 66s. A simple hiking route has been uploaded to the device, it has about a dozen points and is only about 5 miles long. On the device; select routes, find, select the route of interest and click GO. Now the actual location of the GPS is about 20 miles away from the route to be followed. The device takes several minutes 'calculating'. It is actually calculating a route from the GPS location to the start of the route by road !!! The hiking route shown on the device doesn't match what can be seen in Basecamp where it was created; it has many extra 'spike' deviations off of the route. Can't see what settings to adjust to try and prevent this 'calculating' and routing from the device location to the start of the route to follow. Any advice or tips please to prevent this behaviour ??? On my GPSMap 62S it doesn't do anything like this, it simple will show the bearing to the start of the required route.

 

[Nuvi-Nebie]

You need to create a Track rather than a Route, the difference is the way you get from one Waypoint to the next, with a Track there is no 'Calculating', every step is a straight line to the next waypoint, with a Route everything is calculated, if you give a GPS a dozen Waypoints the GPS will generate a path along a road to get to the next Waypoint, you can have a 100 mile Route with only 2 Waypoints (start and end), the whole thing is calculated in the GPS

You will only get the same path if both Basecamp and the 66s have exactly the same map and the same 'rules' eg. quickest, shortest, fastest, avoid toll roads etc. because a Route only becomes a Route when it is applied to a map, you can turn off this auto-routing but you won't get what you want, you will get 12 straight lines

The solution to your problem is to generate the Route in Basecamp, check that goes where you want it to go and then select generate a Track from a Route, this will create a curving line of hundreds of Waypoints, when this new Track is sent to the 66s it will be exactly as it was drawn in Basecamp, it doesn't use any calculation, it doesn't even need the map, it is what is referred to as a 'breadcrumb track'

Also hiking Tracks are often 'off-road' or 'off-path' in which case the 66s can't go where you want it to because a Route won't work without a road/path to follow, a Track doesn't need a map feature to follow

 

[Kevin Kicks]

Thanks Nuvi-Nebie for your reply,
The routes we sometimes create may be hiking and not necessarily following footpaths even and I've found that by setting the mode to 'Direct' in the devices and Basecamp there is no calculation performed and the route is as created with as many or as few points required. On the device the bearing and distance to the next point in the route is shown. My mate's 66s had the mode set to 'Hiking' in the device and the surprise was that the device calculated a road route (!!!) from the current location to the start of the loaded route. I appreciate that routing calculation (including elevation) is dependent on the underlying map. I often use free OpenMap downloads and put them on new micros SD cards to use. Some of them have elevations built in, some don't. As for routing I'm not interested as I never plan to use the handheld device like a car satnav, ie not interested in turn by turn instruction, only the map showing the route.

 

[Nuvi-Nebie]

'Direct' is what you would need, but you will only get 12 straight lines so you either need to convert a Route into a Track using Basecamp or manually add a lot more Waypoints to get the detail required

 

[Kevin Kicks]

That's absolutely fine, the small number of route points was just an example. The main point is to get the device to behave in the way we expected.