Garmin Foretrex 401

Check the ROUTES page. You should be able to list the routes that have been created. In order for the GPS to guide you along a particular route, you have to select it and click FOLLOW. This is explained on Page 11 of the Owners Manual.

It might be that your mapping software has only sent waypoints to your GPS, in which case there will be no routes to select. If that is true then you will need to create a route from a selection of waypoints before you can follow it. This is also explained on Page 11 of the manual.

Keep going!

Ah .. the waypoints page is just that - a list of waypoints. What they are called is up whatever naming convention wheresthepath uses. Waypoints can be shared between routes, and can exist independantly of them, so it is not necessarily a sensible idea to prefix them with a Route name. (Though it would often be nice if this were the case). If I were you I would hunt about in wheresthepath to see if you can influence how it names waypoints. It might also be simpler to start off with a single simple route - perhaps even one that you can follow from your front door -  and see if you can get it to behave acceptably.

P.S. There is another source of possible confusion. If your mapping software - perhaps because you use it on separate occasions - uses the same names for a waypoint then these names can get modified when they are sent to the GPS, as you can't have two distinct waypoints with the same name.

Based on a very quick look at the gpx export from Wheresthepath, plus my own use of a Geko 201 rather than a Foretrex 401, I'd speculate on this...

Wheresthepath looks like it only handles one route at a time (not unreasonable for a free web application)

On export, it appears to name the waypoints that make up the route as Rt0, Rt1, Rt2 etc.

Obviously the next time you come to Wheresthepath to make another route it will again use Rt0, Rt1, Rt2, Rt3... (let's assume the second route is longer).

Now on uploading the first route to the Foretrex it will either accept the first set of waypoint names - Rt0, Rt1, Rt2 - or alternatively it might add a suffix - Rt0 1, Rt1 1, Rt2 1, I'm not sure which.

When you upload the second route I think the Foretrex must be smart enough to avoid overwriting the existing waypoint names (the Geko isn't that smart and it can wreak havoc with your routes if you aren't careful!). So the second route's waypoints, depending on which version it did first time, would either become Rt0 1, Rt1 1, Rt2 1, Rt3 or Rt0 2, Rt1 2, Rt2 2, Rt3 1.  Note how Rt3 picks up a different suffix because the first route was shorter and didn't have an Rt3 in it. This looks plausible given the waypoint names you reported in your original post, Hugh, as the higher numbered ones seem to have lower numbers of suffixes - presumable only your longest route extended to have waypoints 17, 18 and 19 in it?

The existence of Rt1 1-5 as you've presented it here suggests to me that you've uploaded 5 routes in total (or possibly 6) but presumably deleted one of them since - is that correct?

You may be able to confirm if my hypothesis explains things. If the Foretrex menus are like the Geko 201 then take a look as follows.... go to Routes and select the first route as if you were going to follow it. When you say 'Navigate Route' you get a screen which lists the waypoints in sequence within the route, so you can make a note of that list. Do that for each route in turn - even better if you can do it in the order in which you uploaded the routes. Hopefully the sequences of waypoint names will illustrate the pattern I've described.

If not, them I'm as baffled as you! 

I use memorymap and an etrex. Duplicate waypoint names get a suffix of a space then a sequential digit added to disambiguate them. So, if there's a second instance of "WP1"  it becomes "WP1 1" on the garmin. I never knew whether it was memorymap or the etrex that did this - it looks like it may be the Garmin end of things, as Hughs waypoints have a similar sequential suffix. 

Hugh - the waypoints are listed in a 'logical' order on the waypoint page; it is alphabetic order. So, RT1, RT10, RT2 is 'logical' - digits are just treated as letters of the alphabet with lower values than A. Annoying though. If wheresthepath padded the numeric bit of the waypoint with 0s it would be less so. Or you could rename the waypoints to something more meaningful to you - "CARPARK", "SUMMIT" etc ..

You can also access any waypoint anytime you like by going to the Waypoints page and selecting it and doing a GOTO to get directed to it if you wish.

As I said, if it was me, I'd start with one route of a few waypoints, and learn how things behave.

P.S. I see my post has overlapped with Matts; - a possibly less tedious way of renaming waypoints might be to edit the GPX file at the wheresthepath end of things.

capn p - if you haven't caught him yet, two handy things would be

1. allow user to choose the prefix for the waypoint names for a route, rather than 'RT'. 

2. pad the numerical bit of the waypoint with a couple of zeros so that they appear in the order in which they were created when transferred to a Garmin.

These together would make the problems Hugh had transferring multiple routes to his GPS less likely.

> capn p - if you haven't caught him yet, two handy things would be

Already discussed...

I think the prefix issue should be solved by naming the route properly; that's what Bill seemed to suggest.  As I said, not having a Garmin GPS to play with, I can't investigate the dialogue that's performed when uploading routes to Garmins.

That's funny; I posted a reply after I came back from lunch, but it seems to have disappeared... Ah, some funny with our internet; I remember a strange page asking for login details; must have been the failed reply.

Right.  Bill suggested that you need to give the route a name; there should be a box to enter the route name.  Route points should then be prefixed with the route name to make them unique.

Just had a look at some WtP GPX files, and, although the route is given a name, the points are still numbered Rt0.. etc, i.e. not unique.

Looks like the Garmin can't cope with multiple routes that use the same route point names within them; it ought to be able to parse the GPX file to do this, since the route name is held within the <rte>  </rte> markers. It appears that its GPX file parsing is pretty dumb, and takes no account of the file structure of the GPX file, but pulls out 'flat' route point names.

As has been suggested, you could experiment by editing the WtP GPX file and using a 'search and replace' function to replace '<name>Rt' with '<name>uniqueRt', where 'unique' is a name you choose.  Then upload this file to the Garmin and inspect the route points.

The trouble with using the route name as the waypoint prefix is that that would limit you to short route names since waypoints can only be 6 characters. It is certainly good to have a route name - this can then be sent to the GPS to identify the route. Garmin allows 10 character route names. Perhaps allowing the user to associate a waypoint prefix with the route name would be the way to go (like tracklogs).

Also, you need to understand that, for Garmin GPS, waypoints are completely separate constructs from routes. You can have hundreds of waypoints in a Garmin, and no routes at all. So it follows that waypoints need to be unambiguously named, since it is the name that identifies them. A Route is separately named and is an arbitrary sequence of waypoints. This means that waypoints can be shared between routes. When a Garmin gets sent two waypoints with the same name it seems that it disambiguates them by suffixing one with a space and a digit. If you look at this from the point of view of the Garmin, it is the mapping software that is 'pretty dumb' since it has sent two waypoinnts with the same name.

Messing around editing GPX files is a dodgy proposition - a nicer thing would be to show waypoint names on the map, allow them to be edited, and printed, and then tell the user whether they have caused conflicts when sent to the GPS.

Hugh - I'd suggest clearing all the waypoints out of your Garmin before you load a set of routes. That way you minimise the chances of on-the-fly renaming. It also means you've fewer waypoints to scroll through should you want to access one. By the way, I've found it worthwhile to be profligate with waypoints on sections of a route that might be tricky to navigate in bad weather - descents from summits for example.

For your next trick, see if you can upload a track that you have actually walked back onto your map and see how close it corresponds to the route on the map.

Things like assigning a specific prefix to the waypoints used in a particluar route are catered for in Quo (possibly others too, but that's the commercial mapping software I'm most familiar with. That was one feature I requested after buying v1 and they added it in to v2 ).

I suppose to some extend conveniences like that are the difference between purchasing a commercial package* and relying on free internet applications (no dig intended at wheresthepath - it's great).

( * or at least purchasing the maps - Quo software's free. Of course who knows how the choice will develop depending if and how OS mapping becomes 'free' in a few months.)

> Right.  Bill suggested that you need to give the route a name; there should be a box to enter the route name.  Route points should then be prefixed with the route name to make them unique.

I've just checked WtP - there already is a facility to give a route a name. It is the top left most box on the download screen. It defaults to "Name" but can be edited and gets transferred to the Garmin as the name of the route.  If you added a 'waypoint prefix' field to this dialogue, and used it, then you'd be giving the flexibility that has been talked about.

> Messing around editing GPX files is a dodgy proposition

It was a stop-gap suggestion, to investigate what the problem is, not an end solution.  Sorry if this wasn't as obvious as I thought it would be.

> Also, you need to understand that, for Garmin GPS, waypoints are completely separate constructs from routes.

In order to do this, and allow the unit to store multiple routes, it must be able to parse GPX files and make the route points unique, or store them in route-specific areas of memory, and access them accordingly.  It doesn't sound like it's doing this.

Whilst arbitrary wapoints are indeed possible and sensible for stand-alone use, when combined with mapping software and GPX routes, they don't make a great deal of sense, as it's rare that mapping software will link together a set of pre-existing waypoints. It may be an issue that the GPS unit simply hasn't caught up with the concept of the integration between external mapping software and a GPS unit.

> If you look at this from the point of view of the Garmin, it is the mapping software that is 'pretty dumb' since it has sent two waypoinnts with the same name.

Again, not really: if the GPS unit actually understood the hierarchical structure of the GPX XML format, it would know that all route points within a named route were unique to that named route, and store them accordingly.  If the unit cannot cope with multiple stored routes, then it should have some means of dealing with that; deleting an old route when a new route is loaded, for instance, or at least reporting the conflict.

WtP might also be considered to be behaving in a 'smart' (or efficient) way, as it's using the hierarchical structure of the GPX file to minimise the file size, by keeping the rtept names short.

ps. I wouldn't be too surprised if WtP isn't updated in the near future to cope with Garmin's inability to do hierarchical GPX file parsing...