Garmin course planning

Lumen

Cycling from Dublin to the south coast on Saturday.

Quick question....which is the best mapping tool for creating a Garmin course in advance?

One of them creates courses which offset the roads by 5m or so, can't remember which it is.

Raam

Lumen wrote: »

Cycling from Dublin to the south coast on Saturday.

Quick question....which is the best mapping tool for creating a Garmin course in advance?

One of them creates courses which offset the roads by 5m or so, can't remember which it is.

bike route toaster

oflahero

Ah, that's only in places. At worst, it just chirrups 'Off Course'...'Found Course' repeatedly at you at times. Big deal. The ease of use of bikeroutetoaster makes it the clear winner for me...

The worst offending road though is from the top of Edmondstown Road over to the viewing point at Kilakee - TOTALLY off on google maps.

Morgan

I've had great success with:

http://www.gpsies.com

Lumen

Raam wrote: »

bike route toaster

To be clear, do you mean that bike route toaster suffers from the offset problem, or avoids the offset problem?

(please don't answer yes or no )

Raam

Lumen wrote: »

To be clear, do you mean that bike route toaster suffers from the offset problem, or avoids the offset problem?

(please don't answer yes or no )

I believe you can set whatever offset you wish. I've done many a cycle having mapped with BRT or MapMyRide and even MapSource. All have suffered a little bit with the roads not matching exactly, so I would be on course, but not according to my Garmin. It never stopped me getting where I wanted to be.

You'll be fine

Edit: I mis-read your original post a little bit. I think that BRT is the best one to use for mapping.

Stokolan

Id say unless your going to use a garmin source to make the route your going to have that offset problem. I'm sure these sites use different means to get the gps information so there will be differences

ROK ON

I use a map and roadsigns.
Only time I ever got lost I was following another Boardsie who is shall we say prone to getting lost.

barrabus

ROK ON wrote: »

I use a map and roadsigns.
Only time I ever got lost I was following another Boardsie who is shall we say prone to getting lost.

I'v an idea who that was.

blorg

Mapsource is by far the best and will give you an accurate course and turn by turn directions.

The problem with all the other online solutions is that they use Google Maps which are simply inaccurate compared to the actual location of the roads on the ground. They are just a bit of an approximation as to where the road actually is.

The Garmin maps are right. I haven't used them but OpenStreetMap may also be accurate.

Maps and road signs are all very well if you want to follow main roads but if you are plotting a course following L roads there are no road signs.

Raam

When I used Mapsource once, it wanted to route me the shortest way around roundabouts, which invariably was the wrong way. For some reason it just didn't recognise them as such. Never figured out why. Sometimes it sent me the correct way.

-K2-

Lumen wrote: »

To be clear, do you mean that bike route toaster suffers from the offset problem, or avoids the offset problem?

(please don't answer yes or no )

I find that bike route toaster with openstreetmaps works much better than the default google maps, assuming that the road has been mapped by someone else. With the google map and an Edge500 there's usually several moments of being told "off course", no, wait, "on course", no, wait... ad nauseum. There's less of that if the route was mapped using OSM.

Set the map to "Street" (top of the page) and select autorouting to OSM (bottom-right corner).

Blowfish

blorg wrote: »

Mapsource is by far the best and will give you an accurate course and turn by turn directions.

The problem with all the other online solutions is that they use Google Maps which are simply inaccurate compared to the actual location of the roads on the ground. They are just a bit of an approximation as to where the road actually is.

The Garmin maps are right. I haven't used them but OpenStreetMap may also be accurate.

Maps and road signs are all very well if you want to follow main roads but if you are plotting a course following L roads there are no road signs.

Mapsource is definitely the most accurate for mapping actual locations of roads to GPS, but the one problem it has is that it isn't updated as regularly as OSM. It shows a petrol station near my house which has been gone for 5+ years, plus it's convinced that I float across the Liffey every morning as it's missing the Sam Beckett bridge.

blorg

Raam wrote: »

When I used Mapsource once, it wanted to route me the shortest way around roundabouts, which invariably was the wrong way. For some reason it just didn't recognise them as such. Never figured out why. Sometimes it sent me the correct way.

It has different routing modes, if it was set to "pedestrian" it ignores one way restrictions, turn restrictions etc. I generally leave it set to "car" and "shortest distance" which produces generally sensible routing.

The other issue is that Mapsource provides rides which will automatically re-route along alternative roads if you go off course, etc. I don't think Bikeroutetoaster does this, AFAIK you just get a breadcrumb trail and it will tell you "off course" but not re-route you on the quickest route to the next waypoint if you go off course (open to correction on that one.)