After about a decade of using Garmin gps equipment to navigate my way around various mountain biking routes I have to admit, I am honestly (and sadly) not much of an expert on how to do it! I have struggled to create routes, then get the track from Basecamp to my eTrex30 or Edge 1000 and sometimes have the frustration of not having the track show on the device. A lot of this comes down to my basic lack of computer savvy - I am an old school, hands-on kind of bloke and there is no hammer use in computing.....sadly. Sitting at one of these computer things usually bores/frustrates me quickly, I lose interest and yet another fail ensues when I think I can nut-it-out on the fly. 🙄
Thankfully, there are a few people around who ARE interested in taking tracks from their computer and having them seamlessly appear on their gps device and are happy to graciously share their wisdom. I have previously linked to Matt On A Moto here with his take on what software to use.
I have now found an even better and much more in depth tutorial that has been posted to YouTube by Brent Pearson. You may remember Brent helped me out with planning my Flinder's Ranges rides earlier this year (actually, I just stole the fruits of his labour and used his .gpx tracks to follow during my ride! Thanks Brent!!)
Brent goes into GREAT detail with how to use all of the features of the Gaia GPS app which IS a fantastic planning tool. He then explains how to use Garmin Basecamp to tidy those files up so that your gps will accept the tracks/routes. A note here, Basecamp is 10+ years old and was previously called Mapsource waaay back when I purchased my very first cycling Garmin, the Edge 305. As Garmin hasn't monetised the app, there has been zero development of Basecamp since around 2010 or perhaps even earlier - note to Garmin - a huge own goal there!. It is a great throwback though to remind one of what programs looked like just over a decade ago! Oh, how far we have come!
Anyway, so that I have them all in one place I am going to link each of Brett's four tutorials here for convenience - I hope he doesn't mind and I hope you find these as useful as I have. Again, this is all Brent Pearsons hard work.
Grab a cool drink/coffee and settle in!
Part 1.
Super easy these days for bikepacking routes ... plan on RideWithGPS, and you can import routes from there to a modern Garmin (mine's a 530) directly onto the device from your phone, no computer needed.
ReplyDeleteHi Andrew. Yes, I used RWGPS on all my moto rides last year. I only have the free version. Not sure if the paid version is more versatile?
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