Garmin Etrex routes with more than 50 waypoints

I have a Garmin etrex 25 Touch.

Supposedly capable of creating routes with upto 250 waypoints, but boy this has had me beaten for ages.

So like most other people I have ended up following tracks, which are effectively breadcrumb trails. One disadvantage of this is that you get no aid other than looking at the GPS and seeing where you are & where you want to be. I.E. You get no beaps at turn points.

If I create a route with over 50 waypoints & load it on to the Etrex & try & follow it I get an error saying "Only 50 points can be used for follow road navigation".

I have now found a solution/work around that appears to work.

1. on your etrex click on 'Routing' & set the Activity to 'Prompted'
2. Create a track (not a route) using your chosen tool. I often use gpsies.com setting the number of points to < 250.
3. open the track in Garmin's 'Basecamp' software
4. right click in the track & select 'Create route from track'
5. you can view the new route & note the number of waypoints is < 250. The activity in my case is set to 'Mountain Biking'. this is fine.
6. using Basecamp copy the route to the Garmin etrex.
7. turn on the etrex, & once in the chosen sport, MTB in my case, select 'Routes', then select the chosen new route, select 'Go', then instead of the annoying message, 'Max 50 points...' you get a menu & select 'Direct Routing'.
8. & off you go

Happy navigating.

Creating & storing maps on your phone

I have an android phone & I have tried various mapping software applications.

My current favourite is Maverick. This is a great free mapping app with access to all sorts of mapping formats even 1:25,000 Ordnance survey maps for the UK.

The trouble most of these solutions is that the maps are requested on demand, so when you are up in the hills you can not get at the data and when you are abroad it will cost you a fortune.

The solution is to get the data before you need it. Most mapping apps store the requested maps as you view them so you can pan around while on wi-fi for the area you are interested in to view when you are up in the hills.

But what if you want maps for a large area. I am off to Spain soon and found it was taking an age to get the maps I wanted so I looked for an alternative solution.

I chose Mobac. This runs on your PC, downloading the maps and converting them to the mapping software of your choice. You select an area, the style of map and the map client software and away you go.

Things to look out for:

1. The more detailed (zoomed in) maps you choose the larger the data. Its pretty well exponential. Avoiding level 16 will save you loads of time & data.
2. Getting the data on to the phone is also a pain. Transferring 1000s of individual files takes an age. I tried the likes of FastCopy but they corrupted the URL of the USB mounted directory of the phone. I ended up zipping up folders of files, copying these to the phone and unzipping.
3. Connecting wifi'ly has made all the difference to data transfer. Much much faster than USB.

The mapping format I have chosen are the excellent OSM cycle map.

Combing maverick with the excellent Gpsies.com is proving excellent.