Garmin Basecamp shortcuts for making routes
We use custom routes for nearly all the trips we go on, all done on Basecamp and then exported to the GPS, so any ways of easing the generation of routes is always of interest. Unless things have changed recently, Garmin is about the only choice for us because it allows the use of "shaping points" to tweak a route to what you want instead of "waypoints". The difference is that you HAVE to go through waypoints as the GPS will keep sending you back to it if you miss it either intentionally or due to things like road detours or such. You have to delete the waypoint and restart the route to get out of that loop. With shaping points, the GPS tries to take you to them, but if you miss them and get back on the route yourself it just ignores the missed point and carries on your route. We find that feature very useful for how we travel as prone to going off route to see something we hadn't planned on.
Basecamp has drag and drop route modification that works fairly well, but it does have faults like most of the others do also. If you are doing a loop route, for instance, it will sometimes put the drop point into the wrong half of the route as it doesn't know where in the sequence you want it. It will also take lots of drags to do a scenic road that is close to a parallel freeway as it keeps bumping you back to the freeway after each drop point. The Skyline Drive/Blue Ridge Parkway did this a lot. The good is that the drop points go in as shaping points and that the Basecamp and GPS maps are identical, so very little error in what the GPS does.
I have always wished I could just pick points along the route based on experience of how the GPS will calculate and then have Basecamp make a route in that order, but there wasn't, I thought, and easy way to do it. To make a route, I would just make waypoints for anyplace we want stop at and the start and finish points. Basecamp puts them in a list, so then you select the start and finish in order and right click and do make a route which it does. You then manually move the waypoints in between to the route and in the right order. Kind of tedious. What I did notice was that the list appeared to be in set numerical/alphabetical order, not chronological like I picked them.
I decided to do a route and manipulate the order to be chronological instead, hoping that I could then just choose the first and last points and make a route and that Basecamp would add the ones in between in order. The points go on list as a Basecamp generated location which is like an address, but you can rename the easily as you generate them, so I just put a A in front of the first point with a couple of spaces after it, B on the next ect. I picked all the points I wanted to make it a custom route that way and had about 20 points. The list got made in order of the letters, so was also chronological. I highlighted all the points in the list and told Basecamp to make a route. It put them in exact order in the route and the route was near perfect to what I had guessed it would be. I had to add one point between points C and D to get the route I wanted so I just generated a new point called C1 where I wanted it, and it came into the list right after C. I added to the route which was easy because I knew where it went by the C1. I could also have just deleted the original route and made a new one with added point in it, which would have been even easier.
I would guess on the oddball routes that the drag and drop can get confused and it gets tedious to do, this way will cut the time needed to make a route to 25% of what it was. The only added work it is to change the waypoints you don't want to stop at to shaping points, which is only a couple of minutes to do so no big deal.
Basecamp is a quite long learning curve program with some definite quirks. Add to that the fact that most tutorials don't have the time to get into details like above and gets so that many folks don't like it at first, or ever if the don't have the inclination to figure it all out. The deeper I dig, the more usefulness I have found, but most of it is pretty obscure and most undocumented anywhere, I think.
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