TourGuide and proximity questions

The reason the combine Rest Stops works so well is that the coordinates are set at the entrance to the rest stop.Coordinates located more then 50 ft off the road will not alert you unless you have selected the loction as a go to.If you go to proximity points on your unit and touch prioimity alerts change then audio on the bottom of the screen you can change from continuos tone to single tone for the alert.This setting may be different for your unit.Can not explain about the 10/20 mile alert.Have never set one that far.If you set the winery as a go to and no alert then you have a double extension or the file not named the same except the extension.To increase the location of more then 50 ft off the road of travel you may want to add TourGuide to the file name and get more of a radius alert.You will get a 1/4 mile alert automatic with the TourGuide name in the file.To increase that you manual mode.Caution using this method will result in some alerts you may not want.

I can't tell whether you think you have a TourGuide set up for the locations or not. To make them TourGuides, the word "TourGuide" needs to be in the name of the file (and bmp and mp3). However, if you routed to a location and still didn't get an alert, something is wrong -- standard alert locations need to be along your route and within about 50 ft of the road, but if you route to it, I believe that should always work (maybe not if the last 500 ft is off-road).

Regardless, make sure:
1. Your coordinates are immediately next to a road at the entrance to the property, not the house way back off the road.

2. Reload the file making sure that you don't set 10 ft instead of 52,800 ft (10 mi) for the alert distance.

3. Create a custom audio alert with some dead air after the announcement to reduce the frequency of announcements -- only way I know of.

Ok, I did have the prox alerts to continious. I have now changed it to Single. Thanks for that tip.

As far as the 10/20 mile alerts. I'm at a loss. I'll double check the file again and see is I changed it to the wrong proximity. I just looked and all the prox are set to 16093.4 meters (~ 10miles, I triple checked it with google).

I'm almost positive that I've kept the name of the file like I posted above, and did not have the words "TourGuide" in it at all.

If you don't want to use the metric system for the proximity.You can go options,preference and set to imperial.

for TourGuide. I believe you are getting both directions of rest stop, instead of just the side you are directionally going. I set my distance for a rest stop to 5200 feet and didn't make it a TourGuide.

On my last trip I setup walmarts, 7-11, braums, sonics, and several hotel chains as TourGuides. What happens is you get messages for all of these within the circumference of the distance you set when you loaded the TourGuide file. So what happened to me was that in a city I had all these repeating and rotating through each one and they were constantly going off. Just too much noise. So I changed them all to alert with a very quiet simple sound. Well, they still all flash on the screen, but you don't have all the noise with them.

I think you will just have to play with it and adjust to meet what you need. The best things with the poi's for restuarants, stores, and hotels is that you can make searches for them even before you get to a town and have your gps direct you to them.

My two cents

noahjokc

Yea, I've changed it to Imperial, and Metric and it's set to 10 miles either way.

I have often seen this claimed here, but on a recent trip in the north east I found that I was often getting alerts from rest areas on the other side of a divided highway with several hundreds of feet separating the north bound and the south bound lanes. In many cases I got an alert when there was no rest area on my side at all. Either the data has not all been tweaked as some claim or some nuvi versions such as my nuvi 250 do operate in this way.

All previous posts have indicated that this setting does absolutely nothing for custom POIs. Let us know if recent updates have made this functional.

Hmmm, I'll try it out, but on mine I go to Prox alerts, Alerts - Change, Check mark on Custom POI's, Audio button - Single Tone.

Soooo, I would guess that since Custom POI's are checked that is SHOULD work on them...

While experimenting, you didn't by any chance put "TourGuide" in the name of the file, did you? If not, did you look at the coordinates of the offending location to see if was accidently placed in the median or #1 lane of the other direction?

I have no idea what ares you just traveled in but I can say for sure traveling down sections of I95,I75 and I10 I didn't get the results you are reporting.Sure the author would be more then happy to get the areas you had problems with and check them out.He does a great job in keeping this file up to date.

No, I did not.

I did not look at coordinates. I noted this on several different rest areas for North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and (I'm pretty sure but not certain) Pennsylvania. I was driving alone and didn't take detailed notes on which rest areas it was, but it happened many times on the trip, in both directions. Many times I would get duplicate alerts as I passed the rest area on my side and then the rest area on the other side. On other cases I would get the rest area alert for a visitor area area/rest area on the other side of the highway with no rest area on my side and significantly more than 50 feet separating north bound and south bound lanes (in some cases I was not sure how close the lanes were, but in other cases it was very clear that a 50 foot threshold was far exceeded).

This is not a huge deal to me, and I learn other things from the trip that I would much rather see corrected than worry about this (although that may bring up the now forbidden subject of actually having some consistency and logic in POI files). But I had often seen it stated that the rest area file was finely tuned to only alert you if the rest area was in your direction of travel, and my experience was that this is not always so.

I have also noticed that both the north and southbound rest areas on the I35 from Austin to Dallas will alert me. I haven't checked where the markers are, but they are the ones downloaded straight from the combined restareas poi. Its not the end of the world because most of the poi names have either NB or SB on them.

I can't recall any comments about the rest area coordinates being "so finely tuned" that it would not alert to opposite direction locations. What people have said is that the coordinates are quite accurate to the actual off ramp location.
Perhaps you can reference what you are stating to a thread.
Many people have commented about the alerts sounding for the opposite direction locations.

Perhaps Frovingslosh is remembering a similar thread re the Phoenix speed cameras: http://www.poi-factory.com/node/22078

I was able to replicate (at least on my 660) the success of phxflyboy in getting the alerts to alert in only one direction on a divided highway, by moving the coordinates from the roadway to perhaps 40 ft off to the side needing the alert. I am not sure whether you have already employed that technique or not. Likewise, I suggestedn in that thread that Miss POI might want to consider adopting that technique for the speed camera file.

I know that I worked with Mr. Ken on one rest area/view point in MD that was alerting in both directions. I finally got the WB coordinates set so it wouldn't trigger when in the left lane heading east. But it took a lot of work and testing as a simulation wouldn't be as accurate as actually driving on the highway. Fortunately, I go by this particular point 3 or 4 times per month.