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| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| danham |
Posted - 28 juin 2008 : 17:35:21
On the morning of September 11 my son will swing a leg over the seat of his 250 cc Vespa scooter in San Francisco and aim its front wheel toward Ocean City, Maryland some 3700 miles to the east.
Riding in the cross-country Scooter Cannonball Run (http://www.scootercannonball.com/), Joel will be raising money for a musician friend and colleague who was seriously injured in an auto accident and lacks medical insurance. Details can be found on this blog: http://vespacoast2coast.blogspot.com/
Needless to say, planning a route that is fun and safe for scooters ranging from tiny vintage two-strokes to modern highway-capable water cooled rides is a challenge. So is navigating it.
We are hoping to use a Garmin zumo on the scooter and a nuvi capable of advance routing in the support truck, which is my "job." The zumo is really the only choice for the scoot, but a big question is whether to try to plan the truck's route using my nuvi 680 and a series of somewhat clumsy workarounds, or take advantage of the ability to transfer the route from Google maps and use it with little fuss on a nuvi that can accept pre-planned routes, such as a 7xx.
If you look at the Cannonball web site, you can find links to Google maps of each day's route. The organizers are also going to provide both waypoints and compatible route files once everything is finalized. There are checkpoints and the idea is to follow the pre-planned route, not to allow the nuvi or zumo to calculate a "better" one.
So here's what I could use help with from the collective wisdom of the forum. I can create Custom POIs for my 680 which if used in "leapfrog" fashion, will mostly force it to calculate the same route that the Cannonball specifies. But that involves a lot of button-pushing en-route - navigate from A to C with B as a via; then C to E with D as a via, etc.
Can anyone think of a better solution or should I just select the right tool for the job and use a 7xx or 8xx which can accept the pre-planned routes for each day?
The support truck does not have to cover every inch that the scoots travel, but it would be a mistake to get too far off-course and it's a LONG trip! My son will have the harder navigation task, of course, but the zumo should be up to it. Here he is near his home in Brooklyn, no doubt pondering how much it will cost to ship the Vespa to SF for the start of the race [g]:
-dan
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| 15 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| danham |
Posted - 06 oct. 2008 : 18:06:20
Will do. First draft comin' atcha.
-dan |
| gpspassion |
Posted - 06 oct. 2008 : 17:48:26
Yes, a whole new topic would be great, you can start it in the moderator section and we'll move it when it's done. I could also convert it to the portal format later on. |
| smiley1081 |
Posted - 06 oct. 2008 : 16:45:38
I'd say to go the whole nine yards and make an article about it... |
| danham |
Posted - 06 oct. 2008 : 16:15:19
I've started work on this mini-tutorial, and it is going to be long because the devil is in the details.
Should I post it here as a reply, or would you like it to be an article, with a link to this topic?
-dan |
| gpspassion |
Posted - 06 oct. 2008 : 01:45:14
Great, let me fire off, it's got more to do with using a route once it's been imported.
1. What happens if you go off-route, does it :
_a. recalculate the whole route and risk make you use different roads ?
_b. take you back to the next "waypoint" ?
2. If 1a, can this be avoided ? I suspect reloading the route might help
3. How does it determine that you've reached a waypoint, any tolerance ?
4. Can you choose to jump to skip the next waypoint and go to the next one ? |
| danham |
Posted - 05 oct. 2008 : 21:06:31
Cell reception was surprisingly good. Yes, there were some big gaps of silence in Nevada and other places far from civilization, but those tended to be gaps for all brands of phone/carrier, so the usual Verizon advantage over AT&T was not so apparent on this trip.
My iPhone (in conjunction with the 760) was invaluable for locating repair shops, restaurants and hotels, and its Google functions were far superior to the 760's POIs in most of those instances. The one place the 760 really had the advantage was finding fuel using the "Where Am I" function.
I'll try to start organizing a guide, per your suggestion. As discussed above, I converted the official Scooter Cannonball routes from Google maps using the GMap to GPX method. If you and others would like to supply specific questions, that could help me focus as I prepare to write the guide.
-dan |
| gpspassion |
Posted - 05 oct. 2008 : 20:13:39
Very interesting, especially since I drove 50 from Bodie there were a few roads in between) all the way to 70 in 1995, very lonely indeed! Was there cellphone coverage or were you using some satellite phones ?
When you have a chance could you write a definitive "mutliple stop route guide with/without a forced itinerary" guide, I don't think anyone around has as much experience with this as you would.
The usual questions are "can I follow a pre-calulated" route, if yes can I get dynamic guidance or will I just have to look at the map, etc...
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| danham |
Posted - 04 oct. 2008 : 17:23:26
OK, I can now see over/around the laundry pile. The unpaid bill file is another story, however [g].
Here's a link to "Pistol Pete's" photos of the 2008 Cannonball; he took some amazing pics while riding one-handed at speed:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/scooterpics/sets/72157607296074036/
Two of the three support vehicles were using nuvi 760s and one (not mine) kept dropping the route and giving odd directions. I didn't get a chance to examine it in action, but once or twice helped program it for rescue missions and saw nothing obviously wrong, but the driver of that truck threatened to frisbee the thing into a canyon and ended up shutting it off.
In fairness, I'd say two things: 1) he was hopeless with cell phones, computers and nuvis (but a wizard with a wrench and a Vespa); 2) my 760 performed very well, with only a few exceptions.
Here's one time it really aced a rescue run. One of the riders broke down on a very lonely stretch of US 50 (aka "The Loneliest Highway in America") and could not give me his location in terms of an address, intersection - wasn't even sure which town he was in or had passed. If this sounds clueless on his part, try riding 400 miles a day on a Vespa and see how much of a clue you have [g].
At any rate, using the track log on my 760 I took the few clues he could give me, named some towns along the way and he recognized one name but not the second, meaning he was between the two, and found his likely location and gave him an ETA (it was about 70 miles from where my truck was [sigh]).
In another instance, I got a call for help just after negotiating a nasty road construction detour that held everyone up for a very long time. Rather than backtrack through that, I hit the Detour button and got a very decent alternate route. Good thing, as that run was 128 miles round trip to deliver a part.
-dan |
| danham |
Posted - 02 oct. 2008 : 03:12:06
I'm back after 4k+ miles in a rental truck supporting the Scooter Cannonball.
The nuvi 760 which was on loan and which I am about to purchase worked quite well, but did exhibit some of the glitches people are talking about here, such as intermittent boot-up delays lasting many minutes ("Maps Loading") and voice directions given after the turn was already made. I was running 4.0 and had no opportunity to try 4.1.
It also had a nasty habit of simply stopping a route all by itself - the ETA and purple stripe disappeared and the green bar started showing cross streets instead of the next turn. But it only did that twice and in general it really helped me with some very tricky navigating and a few scooter rescue missions.
And one or two of its worst "wig outs" were also in places where several other models and brands of GPS lost their minds too - a TT, Magellan, StreetPilot and several Zumos all went nuts, as did the 760, trying to stay on US 50 near Athens, OH, for example.
More about that when I get sorted out and catch up on the forum.
-dan |
| danham |
Posted - 22 août 2008 : 23:47:06
The slime-weasels actually grabbed my wireless router and three external HDs and started to yank, but something must have spooked them and they dropped them, so I have backups from a week ago. But guess when I did the majority of the GPS grunt work? Yup, since that backup and before the next one. Grrrr.
I like your "stealth backup" idea a lot, and given that I have a wireless NAS setup wouldn't even have to snake wires.
Thanks!
-dan |
| smiley1081 |
Posted - 22 août 2008 : 23:28:22
Getting an Ethernet hard disk, connecting it to the home network from a hidden location a doing backups in that has suddenly created an interest in me.
Sorry about your theft, Dan... |
| danham |
Posted - 22 août 2008 : 23:08:39
Quick update. My 350 and 680 and my son's zumo were stolen Aug. 19 when our house was burglarized.
The very bad news is that my laptop was also taken and so I have had to do all the route tweaking and conversion from scratch.
The good news is that I have acquired a nuvi 760 to use in the support van (and my son will buy a new zumo) and I have started to learn how all this plays out on the screen.
Thanks to everyone's advice and help, it looks like we will be good to go.
-dan |
| danham |
Posted - 20 juil. 2008 : 13:54:23
quote:
I think I've missed the point about why a recalc is bad?
If you need to follow an exact route, and especially if that route consists of roads that do not fit the nuvi parameters of "fastest" or "shortest" or whatever, then a recalc can "spoil" the pre-planned route unless you have loaded it with enough waypoints to force the route you want.
Most of the time, this would really only apply to an event like the one described in this topic.
-dan |
| macta |
Posted - 19 juil. 2008 : 03:24:16
quote:
Originally posted by larelr2003
But to join a route mid-way you need to make your way to the highlighted route on your own, although the Nuvi will eventually recalculate and guide you (this, of course, is not good if you don't want a recalculation to take place)
I think I've missed the point about why a recalc is bad? I tried a little experiment where I created a route on the Nuvi 760 with some waypoints and even after a recalc it still had all my waypoints? I then tried importing something a bit bigger created with google maps - and again after a recalc it still had all my points?
In fact it seemed that if you wanted to join your route back at a different point (skipping a few ponints) then you need to go to the "Current route" entry and remove them. But this seemed ok as it still preserves your original master route which you could load up again and replace the "current route".
So it all looks good now - except that for newcomers I'm sure that loading a route and not going to the beginning will be quite confusing.
Tim |
| larelr2003 |
Posted - 18 juil. 2008 : 20:22:24
It's pretty straight forward when starting at the actual beginning of a saved route or if you really do want to navigate (be guided) to the very beginning of a route (answer "yes" to the prompt). But to join a route mid-way you need to make your way to the highlighted route on your own, although the Nuvi will eventually recalculate and guide you (this, of course, is not good if you don't want a recalculation to take place). If you need active guidance to the route before joining and don't want a recalculation, you will have to set a point at the place you want to rejoin it and navigate separately to that point and then reload the original route. You could also try driving to the route using just the map mode (zooming out a bit might show both your current position and the highlighted route) or even following a track back (show tracks) if you left the route at the same point you want to rejoin it. It's not "perfect", but it will work. |
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