Creating a Route with stops

The Nuvi 650 is not routeable and your Nuvi does not allow more than one stop (inserted as a via). You can use Mapsource to set up up waypoints and they get loaded into your nuvi as a favorite. You can label them in the order you want to stop or you can seach (pull up) your favorites and they will tell you closest ones and set them as destinations.

Just make a Custom POI with all your customer locations.
You can look up coordinates using a multitude of applications.
Then they will show up in your Custom POI section on your GPSr sorted by the closest to the furthest and which direction they are in (by arrows)

On a wonderful web site by Gary Hayman, he give a technique that might be of help to you. It is quite simple but profound.

http://home.comcast.net/~ghayman3/garmin.gps/page3.htm#via

This is something I cna really use when on the road. A great work-around!!

Thanks

You can also create ersatz "routes" by creating custom POIs, rather than Favorites.

Use MapSource to create what it calls "waypoints," for every turn or stop along your route. If you wish, create a proximity alert for each, eg 2 miles out. I save each route with a file name that begins with the word "Route," so that all routes are grouped together, eg: Route - Grandma's, Route - NASCAR.

In use, there are two ways to approach it:

-- Follow each POI point by point, in sequence. As you approach/visit/pass each waypoint, you hit the Back button and go to the next POI in the file.

-- Instead of going to the next POI, you Go To the one after it. Then you go back to the first POI, Go To it, and make it a via point. Many people on this board take that approach. Personally, though, I just find it too distracting while driving.

As with any POI file, the POIs will appear in order of proximity. If that's going to be a problem, you can name/number each file as described in the posts above.

One nice thing about this POI approach (vs Favorties) is that there is no "clutter"; the only elements that you have to deal with are those in the POI route file.

I kinda like this idea. Looks pretty simple!

As you have read, there are numerous work-arounds for what you want to do. But they will take some work on the computer to accomplish. You might want to look at the Nuvi 750 or 760 instead. They both support routing and after inputting multiple waypoints, the 750/760 will reorganize the route on command to pick the most efficient route that takes you to all of your stops. I don't see that option in MapSource, it's built in to the GPS itself.

Dear smaul,

Thank you. Gary's site taught me some great things. I looked at all the pages there. It was particularly useful as Gary and I both have the nüvi 650.

I did note that Gary indicates repeatedly that he only enters five digits after the decimal point. I have been entering as many as Google Earth would provide. I tried to find the reason at Gary's site for the limit of five but failed. Is there a problem if one enters more than five digits after the decimal point?

david

Enter as many as you like. The Nuvi and MapSource rounds to 5 digits, so there is no point to more. Unless you are entering POI's instead of Favorites. There, it appears that the Nuvi will recognize and use more digits after the decimal.

Dear John,

Thank you. I appreciate your quick answer.

I should have indicated that my coordinate entries were going into my Custom POI files.

david

Google usually gives 6 decimals, so that's what I use, too. I'm pretty sure one site gave me 8 digits after the decimal and the Nuvi did not complain about loading the file. I do know that it does indeed use at least all 6 digits in a POI listing and it has better accuracy than it does with 5 digits.

When I opened my Favorites file with MapSource, I saw only 5 digits after the decimal point. When I opened the same file with Notepad, I saw 6 digits after the decimal point.

I concluded that MapSource was rounding to 5 digits, but that the underlying data had 6.