Quote:
Originally Posted by CanuckRV
we have the Garmin RV we turned off the RV and run as a car as we couldn't go on secondary roads where we wanted it keeps trying to take us back to freeways. We only use it for the backup camera now.
|
Going as a car will open up more routes, but doesn't get rid of all the routing where you don't want to go. The route type settings, like fastest/shortest, etc and avoidances also influence where you wind up.
I finally gave up, as it appears you have also, on being able to set things so the GPS would give the route I wanted. Modifying the route by adding waypoints in the GPS is very tedious and hard to do if you are trying to do a custom route.
Another, very irritating "feature" of GPS units is that if you have a bunch of waypoints to force a route and miss one of them due to road construction a short side trip, even going a bit off the main road to get gas, the unit will keep telling you to go back to go through the waypoint. If you delete that waypoint, it will freelance and route from last one you went through and may go where you don't want.
With a Garmin there is actually a way to address almost every case of stuff like this. Many times we want to be able to choose a specific route, mostly for nice drives or road style, maybe just because we haven't been there before, whatever. On those occasions, which are more our norm, I prebuild the route on Garmin Basecamp mapping software. It is like doing a route on Google Maps, but it uses the same maps and algorithm setup as the GPS so things match. It also allows you to quickly upload the routes to the GPS along with any other points you may want to go to not on the route. Basecamp runs on my home PC when at home, and on our traveling laptop on the road. It does not need an internet connection like Google maps does, so you can use it anywhere. I can lay out a complex route going odd ways and the GPS will follow it exactly near 100% of the time. Once the route is made on the PC, I can go into the text listing of the route and change the "waypoints" to "shaping points" if we don't want it to announce them or force us to go through them. Miss one and all that happens is that it is that it picks the route back up as soon as it realizes you are back on it.
Basecamp does have a bit of a learning curve, but worth it for us for certain. With practice, routes can be done very quickly. Most of the daily routes are maybe 10 minutes to put together and upload. I just did a route that we may use this coming fall that is partial repeat of a trip we took in 2014 before we had all the custom route stuff worked out well. It entails the entire Skyline Drive/Blue Ridge Parkway/Smoky Mountain Parkway, plus some stuff we may want to stop at along the way which are just points of interest and done as side trips from the route. IIRC it a bit over 400 miles. It took well over 50 shaping points to make the GPS stay on the slow, hilly, curvy, slow, tunnel filled, parkways as it would always want to go elsewhere that it thought was better. The last trip on the route was a pain. I did the entire route in probably under 2 hours total work on the PC in my spare time.
There are several experienced Basecamp users on the this forum that do similar type routings, so several discussions in the history on here.
It is nice that Basecamp is a free download from Garmin and you put maps on it by using the GPS as a go through to get them for free. When new maps come out, you are able to hook up the GPS to the PC and them download the maps to Garmin and the GPS at the same time which saves hours of download time and maybe 5gb of data use. This also assures the maps are identical.
Trucker GPS?
Linear Mode
