Garmin Montana

It seems to have logged an error(s) but it just looks like a little register dump after that. I don't see anything hinting at what caused it heartburn. I'll look at it following other errors for s^!ts and giggles... I'm not getting BirdsEye error anymore...

Well DRTBYK posted some instructions that look like if you're following the route as a waypoint to waypoint route without any auto-routing you should be able to re-enter the route at whatever waypoint you want. I think I did this "in the field" a while back and it worked for the non-autorouted active route but not good for for a route that's autorouted. Not sure though.

So..mebbe to simplify. When you are navigating a route (after "where to", "routes" menu) and touch the route directions on the map page it will take you to the "active route" page where you can then touch the waypoint that is your desired next waypoint....

Somehow that doesn't seem to simplify....

Navigating this way does not work with "auto-routing". If you were auto-routing you would have been prompted when you missed a waypoint anyway and the Montana would not give you any way to bypass it. Then again, I can't imagine anyone using auto-routing in a Rally(?).

I can't speak for rallying, it's not my bag. I'm just not into organized events. But for "off-road" exploring, now that more maps have a lot more routable dirt (at least here in AZ), I often try to use it for that.

It's nice to be able to build a route while out exploring, on-the-fly as a series of just a few waypoints that will auto-route and follow the maze of dirt roads we have here in the mapset. As an aside, one of the really big pains is not being able to have legs that remain direct since not all navigable paths are auto-routable...

E.g. I am heading out to our White Mtns (Pinetop, Alpine, Springerville area) this weekend for some exploring (a few waypoints from google earth) and have friends with cabins to visit (all waypoints) and spots I've been before (waypoints). There are a lot of dirt roads in the area that are supported by CN and 24k and I've only been on 20-25% of them...

If you were building your route in v4.2.2 of BaseCamp you could create mixed-travel routes and send them to the Montana where you could navigate them UNCHANGED.

I bought a used Montana, should be here soon! Now to learn to use it

99% of my routes are on-the-fly. I usually create them from where I am which I don't sit at home and plan. More often than not, I will want to CHANGE my on-the-fly route so this is capability that if it were in the floptana, would be of *much* greater value than in a PC which isn't really suited for on-the-fly...

About the only thing I use a PC for with regards to preplanning is to create waypoints of interest from google earth. I don't even need basecamp for that. I am even less of a fan of basecamp as I am the floptana... It's *ridiculously* slow (even in very fast workstations), has horrible search, a sloppy UI, not much useful functionality beyond what mapsource has (it has plenty of useless stuff though), etc...

The main thing I use BC for (painfully) is the BirdsEye and .jpg integration - one of the cooler things about the floptana. Although they're both somewhat more tedious processes than they should be IMO.

When I do look at routing on the PC I just use Google earth for the waypoints and Mapsource for the routing. Easy as pie and *much* faster. I will take a look at the latest BC. I have to admit I don't keep up with it much...

It's great that you don't sit at home but what's stopping you from creating a route on the Montana that you can edit when you want to?

I have to admit, I almost never do routing on the fly. Aside from auto routing to a gas station or maybe a restaurant. I do poke around off route to explore on occasion, but I have my GPS set to not recalculate so I'll wander off route, then get back on route and continue.

There's a learning curve, but really, if you just sit down and USE it eventually you'll be just as comfortable with it as you are with Mapsource.

Can someone help me please, I've had my Montana a while now, got my profiles and routing etc sorted but there is one thing that bothers me.

Here's the scenario; I have a route stored on the Montana, it is say an off road route but it could be a road route, it is 40 miles away from current location, now how can I get the Montana to route me to the start of the off road route?

The method above is one way to do it too----- Lycan1

If I am not mistaken just start the route and the Montana will navigate to the beginning of the route.
And then it will navigate that route.

Fred

You can only do it with a saved route, not an on-the-fly route since the wonderful floptana doesn't support multiple vias, only a single on-the-fly via (I so don't get this). And to the best of my knowledge you can't do mixed routes on-the-fly.

Oh I've used BC enough and am completely comfortable with how to use it. Some of what I'm not comfortable with is how incredibly slow it is and how lame the searching is. Oh yeah, it gobbles disk space too. Every now and then I see it's chewed up >40-50GB of space (........Application Data\Garmin\BaseCamp\DeviceCache) so I just nuke the directory when it gets so big which of course makes the next time I plug the device or removable drive take forever. It's weird that even when I'm not changing maps, etc. on those devices that directory just seems to keep growing. Why it gets bigger so much than the data on the devices is a mystery. Heck it's a mystery why it puts it all local and then you can't use it unless the device is plugged in anyway. Stupid stuff.

Mapsource pretty much does what I need and it's *much* faster. Orders of magnitude. Searches are more straightforward too. I did put the BC 4.2.2 and being able do mixed routes might make sense to use it every few months... if I'm patient enough for it to load and sync up with the device.

If people can't tell, I have a complete lack of patience with what I see as foolishness or wasting my time!

That's pretty much why I only read the bottom lines on your posts.

Found an issue with 5.30: most of the icons I had assigned to shortcuts had changed. Only took 5 minutes to switch them back, but I guess it needs reporting.

Aside from breaking something AGAIN, I don't suppose it fixed anything? Since I don't plan on buying one of their VIRB cameras I think I'll stick with what I'm on.

This is supposedly fixed in 5.30: "*Fixed issue with route calculations always avoiding seasonally closed roads"

I'd say this was worth getting the latest for, if it's truly fixed. I can check if it's fixed by creating a route which takes me through a seasonal ferry; last time we tried to route that way, it told us to go around as if there was no ferry there and the ferry runs 8 months of the year.

Ahh, guess that would be worth it depending where you spend the bulk of your riding, but since almost all my riding is down south where we don't really have to deal with seasonal road closings. As stands right now I prefer not having those stupid lost sat faults come up so I won't be going to 5.30.

Thanks, I will be quite interested to learn what your results are.

Good point.

With CNNA enabled I created a route to a seasonal ferry, and my Montana 650 with version 5.30 took me to that ferry and routed across it.

With Topo Canada V4, which is supposedly an auto-routing mapset, it didn't know about the ferry.

Not very conclusive but it's all I have time to do right now.