Garmin Montana

I think we need to take this up with Garmin Cartography. Here's a series of screen shots I made tonight, while simulating a route through the 417 to Alexandria. As seen in the shots, it clearly looks like you're to get off at the Metcalfe street exit. Even the lane indicator says so.

Montana Fail. Went to use it for the first time going to baja. After about 30 minutes of working fine, the screen goes crazy. Side ways, upside down, right side up, then it shuts off. Happend every hour andore frequent as the days went by. I know the connection is good because the Montana powers up and down as the bike does. Garmin tech support never even heard of this. Sent it back today and they're going to send me another one. Irritating because we wen to baja and it was needed.

Sounds like two common issues: you need to lock the screen orientation through Setup/Display/Orientation, and you need an earplug in the battery case to stop the shutdowns.

We were playing with 5 different Garmins one day. Had them all set with the same version of CN and the same avoidance's. Had them route from Dallas to Clarksville AR. Got 5 different routes. One of them actually came up with a 700 mile route. The most accurate one was the el cheapo Nuvi 265, the route was a little over 300 miles.

But if I'm riding in a straight line, why would the screen go everywhere?

Create a route in Basecamp between two points as far apart or as close as you want. Then double click in the map window on the route and a property window will open. The 'Summary' field for the route will show the total number of via points it has. The via points will take the names of the two points you selected.

Point A and Point B are defined by you. You want to get to Point B via Point A.

daryl

Depending on the angle of the gps, the accelerometer, which normally switches it from Landscape to Portrait mode, gets confused and switches orientation when it's not required. On a bike, or even in a car, it's almost always necessary to lock the orientation.

Come to think of it, even when walking and using it as a handheld, the screen needs to be locked.

What "FAQ" exactly is christian referring to? It sounds like a feature request and not the Wiki FAQ Page that describes how to do things that actually are implemented today? I'd like to add my vote there for this feature.

Meanwhile I'm looking for a workaround. If you have several Favorite Tracks but you don't currently want to see them, can you move them from Favorite Tracks to Archived Tracks (where for me they stay hidden)? Then just pull ONE track from Archived at a time to Favorite so it will appear every time you turn on the power?

The downside I suppose is that you have WAY TOO MANY Archived Tracks so it would be hard to find the specific one you want. But other than that does this work?

(Again my issue is when I turn on the power, every Favorite Track will show on the map and you have to go into each one and set it to Hide On Map.)

Track Colors:
Let's say I have say 3 tracks in 3 different colors: red, blue, green and I see them all on my map at once which is exactly what I want. Now how do I tell which track is which easily - so I can find a particular colored track in Track Manager by name?

You can use Track Manager and select a track and then pick Set Color but it doesn't tell you what the current color is, only that you can set it to any color listed. grrr.

All I can figure out is to pick View Map for a track and it just shows that one track on the map and I can then see its color. Not the same, I just want to "review" which color each track is before I set out so I know which one is which.

Christian is talking about my Wisdom and FAQ thread, not the Wiki. And you're right, that is DRTBYK's wish list as presented in the Wisdom and FAQ thread. But his list includes suggestions made by a number of people so it's not really his wish list alone.

This may be old news but is really handy. You can give Google a "site:" option to force your search to be on a specific website, I use it all the time for.. site:advrider.com

It comes in handy for searching the montana wiki page just put in the site:garminmontanagpsr.wikispaces.com in front of anything you want to search (not case sensitive):

Examples:

1.
site:garminmontanagpsr.wikispaces.com hide map
Will search only the wiki pages for any occurrence of "hide" or "map", maybe too broad of a search but....

2.
site:garminmontanagpsr.wikispaces.com "hide on map"
Will search only the wiki pages for the exact phrase "hide on map"

Try it out! It is a GREAT timesaver. There is lots in the Wiki but sometimes for me is hard to find!

Feature Request #79 added.

Ah yes I see the linky in your Signature now.. thanks!

Thanks now any other workaround ideas for this problem? Would the above work or is there a better one? What do YOU do?

(As an aside, do we have a "workaround" page for "the next best thing" to do when a highly requested new feature is not implemented yet? That would be nice addition to the Wiki... )

The Wiki currently has 80 feature requests listed.

Are you suggesting a new page for each feature request to discuss potential work around's? :huh

You are more then welcome to start a discussion there about any work around you are interested in. Someone with helpful information to share may read it and respond.

Hmmn....what if you preceeded each track name with it's color? "Blue_SR133 to Smithville", for instance.
Wouldn't this cause all tracks or routes to be listed alphabetically under each color in Track or Route Manager?

Or would they still be listed by proximity....I forget.:huh

Well, no, not exactly, but I think that "workarounds" are an extemely powerful tool to avoid the frustration we all feel with this thing from time to time. I know I have increased my Montana's usefulness several times over by learning some of them, like just the subtle way naming conventions have of making lists more user friendly.

However, they are very hard to find, being buried in this thread way back, or in posts on the BC Forum, etc. I've forgotten dozens of them, even though my Word doc of clips from this forum is now 107 pages long and I haven't even updated it for months.

Perhaps an expanded "Tips and Tricks" section would be a way to collate a bunch of these.

BTW, I got out on the F650GS today for a short ride, the first since Dec.1st.....I feel MUCH better!

That's pretty much what the Wisdom and FAQ was supposed to be - a distillation of the information in this thread. I had hoped to get more help with it at the time but the people I asked were either too busy or not interested for whatever reason, so I went ahead and made some of it up myself. I did end up with a few valuable contributions from inmates as well.

Re: getting out on the bike - I got my DR650 ready to go today - but it looks like our warm weather will be short lived. It went up to +13C today, but we're back into the minus double digits in the next few days.

Ok this is a LOOOONG post, bear with me I do have some questions at the end! :eek1

I come from a 60Csx and only have experience (limited at that) on tracks so all this routing terminology is new to me. The term "via" is confusing and I think people use it from past experience in Garmin SW or GPSr's... On the one hand, as dlh62c has pointed out, "technically" in BaseCamp all "items" on a route show up in the route properties as "Via Point Name", even the start waypoint A to finish waypoint Z.

But then I see posts like:
- "use 'real' waypoints instead of shaping points"... and I assume these shaping points are just not actually waypoints but just map locations you pick in the SW app (Basecamp) itself.
- "I have never had a Route lockup if I placed my Via Points after Intersections when I needed them"... in this case maybe the word Shaping Point could have been used instead.

I'm guessing that a lot of the use of terms (via vs. shaping) comes from past GPSr's (perhaps Zumo?) but I want to know if this is correct:
- Although in Basecamp technically all points in a route are "Via Points" as listed under Properties tab for a route..., people tend to think of a route as 1 start point, 1 finish point and 0 or more Via points in between. Furthermore some via points can be actual waypoints as well and others can just be locations on the map not saved as a waypoint.
- Shaping points are a special type of Via Points in Basecamp but that are added just to force a route to go a certain path (usually after and/or before a turn). Technically to be a "shaping point", in the Properties Tab, right click on a Via Point and select "Don't Alert on Arrival (shaping point)" so then this becomes a Shaping Point type of via.

Is this correct OR are people often just intermixing old terminology from previous Garmin apps and hardware and not necessarily the Basecamp and Montana combo terms?

Anyhow for my discussion these are the terms I am using.

I understand the basic difference between tracks and routes (and what mapsets are routable) but can somebody point me to a primer on routing terminology and how to create a route in Basecamp please? Here's what I've found so far:

I found this Basecamp Tutorial - How to create a route on the other Wiki (garmin-mapsource but now includes Basecamp). It got me started and it is GREAT for a step by step Tutorial.

Around HERE we have a discussion with DRTBYK and others about basically creating a Direct route in Basecamp and creating a Track from that route, then change the route to Direct before loading both Track and Route to the GPSr where you then pick a profile that has its activity set to something other than Direct (like Auto or Motorcycle) for the Routing calculations.

So when I hear "Direct" route on ADV (for motorycles!) I assume this means it was Direct in Basecamp but NEVER used in Direct mode on the Montana because it is always routed as someting other than Direct on the Montana (based on the Setup->Routing->Activity settings for the current profile). Is this right? Otherwise I could never understand why anyone would want to follow a straight line on the Montana (i.e. Direct).

Ok so here are my questions:
- I think like many people I want to go from Start to Finish and I want to take certain roads to get there. But just because I end up adding Via Points in between the Start and Finish to shape the route, I don't want to be FORCED to hit each Via Point as a real destination, I mean if I pass one by then just keep routing me towards the Finish only and forget any Via I have already passed.

Is this possible?

For example, suppose you want to go from St. Louis to Denver and maybe through Kansas City you want to take a side route around downtown KC so you add some shaping via points so it routes you on the side route. But when you get to KC the side route you picked is too crowded or closed so you end up on a different route to KC. In that case once you've passed KC and those side route (shaping via points), you don't want it to keep trying to get you to go backwards to find that side route in KC because you are already way past it towards the only destination you care about which is Denver.

How do you do it? From my experiments, even if you make a Via Point become a "shaping" point, it seems intent to make sure you actually reach that shaping Via Point.

If you need more info, Here is exactly what I did, step by step:
- Following the Basecamp tutorial link above, it basically has you create a route using a Start and a Finish waypoint, then using the "insert" tool (pencil erasor icon, aka "rubber band") on the map to pick spots on the map to alter the route. These essentially become inserted as via points (as seen in Properties) and are not waypoints as well. I then turned these into shaping Via Points.
- When I follow this route on the GPSr (say in Auto mode), it always wants me to go to the shaping Via Point and if I bypass it (say the street is under construction and I take a side street), it keeps routing me to the shaping Via Point even if I have to make a u-turn, even after I am almost at my Finish destination. Not what I want.

Snooker, what I did was to turn off automatic re-routing. This way, if I skip something, the GPS doesn't constantly try to make me go back to it. The downside is that if I get off my route it will not route me back to it, but I can look down at the screen to see where it is and go get over to it. Once I am back on it, the turn prompts will resume.