mr_antares

A question for all of you current (and former) 305 owners.

I'm looking for a higher tech / more reliable method of following the cue sheets for the weekend rides that I do. This is especially important since one of the local towns has declared war on "arrows" and many of the rides will be conducted without the benefit of complete road markings.

Most of these rides have GPX files available (from MapMyRide, Gmap-pedometer, Bikely, etc) for download. I presume that these can be loaded in the GPS as a "course".

I know that the 305 lacks the mapping features of the 605/705, including "turn by turn navigation". However, if I have downloaded the course, will it give me audible and visual cues of the upcoming turns?

I know that the 705 will do everything I need, but if the 305 will do it for less money, I'd rather not spend the money. . It's likely that the 705 would be better for getting back on course after you make a wrong turn, but it's hard to justify for that feature alone.

Anyone have direct experience to share?

galyons

The preloaded course on a 305 is a graphic breadcrumb trail with your position marked by a pointer. The breadcrumb line gives you some visual cuing as to the turns of the route. If you go off course, you get an "Off Course" text box and a buzz. The arrow appears to point the direction back to the course. When you are back on course you get a "Course Found" text box, the buzz and the pointer is back on the course.

I am a relatively new user and have not ridden a course with many right or left turns. It has not been a problem when mapping my own rides. I would not want to use the 305 on an unknown course without a map and/or cue sheets.

Cheers,
Geary

funbob

With the 305, there's a difference between courses and routes. A course is intended more for a known ride and contains extra stuff like the elevation profile and pace data. It'll bleep at you if you wander off course and bleep again when you're back on course but that's about it.

With a route, you can set actual waypoints (up to 100 per route I believe) and the unit will alert you as you approach the next waypoint in your route and give a distance remaining countdown. It's just a simple matter of placing your waypoints at the different junctions along your route and using a naming convention like "LT", "RT", etc. and you'll get very usable navigation.

I use Garmin's own Mapsource program to create the routes and upload them directly to the unit. It's most useful if you own a Garmin map product otherwise you're limited to the very sparse basemap which can make more complex route planning difficult. But even without a detailed map you can still use it to import .gpx files made with other online route planning products and write them to the unit.

There's a tutorial at https://frank.kinlan.co.uk/?page_id=410 that explains the process in a bit more detail. I don't mess with the whole GPSbabel part it covers opting to use Mapsource instead.

mr_antares

In most cases, I don't have control over the GPX file, I'm downloading it from "MapMyRide" or some similar service, and I can't name the waypoints.

I read somewhere that the 305 has a limit on waypoints. Is this true? A 50 to 70 mile ride could easily have 200 waypoints.

Would the 605/705 be a significant improvement over the 305 in this regard? Are the maps and turn by turn directions that much better?

bkwentz

One is none, two is one.
carry a traditional cue sheet as a back up. That said, i think it is possible to make that work. if you have the coin upgrade to the 605/705 series. its does nothing worse and maps much better.

spinnaker

The 305 is not a mapping GPS and hence a poor substitute for a tip sheet. All you will really see is the track and no map. It would be very difficult to know exactly where to turn with no visual clues other than the track cahnging direction.

You should invest in one of the mapping GPS devices. They are excellent for following a route. The only problem is the tracks downloaded from places like mapmyride would like the visual and audio cues before each turn.

funbob

If you plan on using it with a Garmin map product like City Navigator, the 605/705 would perform comparably to any of their traditional mapping GPS's with turn by turn guidance. However, even the 605/705 still has the 100 waypoint limit. Unless you're doing a really intricate route, I'd find it hard to believe you'd run into that limit.

mr_antares

The problem is the way that MapMyRide and similar route generators work. When in "follow roads" mode, they generate hundreds of intermediate points, and they don't distinguish the points that actually mark intersections from those that just follow the road.

I downloaded a typical route GPX file. The route is 49 miles long, and the cue sheet has 45 turns on it. The GPX file consists of a single <trkseg> with over 900 <trkpt> elements. Each trkpt has "lat" and "lon" attributes, and nothing else (no labels at all).

I'm sure I could manually construct a route in the GPS from the 45 turns, it just seems rather tedious to do this, and I was hoping for an automated solution. Is there something in the Garmin software that can do this for me?

MarvelousMark

I use www.bikeroutetoaster.com to do "turn-by-turn" navigation on the Garmin Edge 305. The designer of that particular site decided to add Course Points at the turns when you draw the map, and you can edit them on the cue sheet page. I put the road name in the Course Point Name (up to 10 characters). Then I download TCX file to the Edge 305 and Select Training --> Courses on the Edge. "Do Course".

On the Course page, you'll see a field called "Dist to Crs" or something like that. It will display the distance to the next course point, the direction of the next point, and your course point name. The map will display the directional symbols of the turns on the "breadcrumb" trail.

Works pretty good as a "fudge" for Turn-by-Turn. The problem is that Course Points take up a lot of memory, so you'll have to load these one or two courses at a time. I don't use his Course Point warnings feature, which adds a second course point 200ft or so before the turn to warn you, just because it takes up too much memory.

Anyway, not perfect, but I've been surviving that way for 2 years now.