The problem with using a Garmin GPS

but Garmin should not be expected to follow all the changes related to businesses (of all types). From a practical standpoint that would be an enormous task. I happen to know the owner of a local restaurant who recently changed from a breakfast/lunch spot to offering dinner. As part of that change he also changed the name. He tells me that updating a business address or location on Garmin maps is the responsibility of the business owner.

I guess one could argue that if you don't know where your going and your garmin gets you there, you wouldn't know theres a quicker way. I now have Live traffic and my Nav system uses satellite. I don't like android auto. I still use my DriveSmart 65 in my 2011 Truck. There is just no comparison between the two systems. The Garmin feels like i'm in the dark ages. But using the Garmin in my Truck is still better than nothing at all.

Garmin used to, and perhaps still does, get their updates of new residences and business addresses from DNB. I once took a trip to Arkansas and got directions to a Texaco station, because I had a Texaco gas card. When I arrived at the destination, i only found a Circle K. I asked the manages where the Texaco station was, he replied that it was a Texaco 6 years earlier. now, there were none in town. Google Maps had the correct information, Garmin did not. Maybe they need a new source for their information.

Like I posted recently, Two Is One And One Is None. When navigation is critical, consider using BOTH Google Maps or whatever app of choice AND a Garmin GPS.

Regarding the other point about maps, I wonder if OpenMapChest would have it on their maps. One of the features that Garmin had sometime back was Google on the Garmin GPS. Only a few Garmins had it, but it was a great feature to have.

Have not tried this for a while.. https://itstillworks.com/send-mapquest-map-route-garmin-1356... scroll down to find.

Garmin is a $55 billion dollar company. Google (Alphabet) is a 4.2 trillion dollar company. Google's primary business is advertising, and many of those companies are their clients. Keeping their POI database up to date has got to be a core part of their business. And they have the infrastructure to constantly push out updates. Is it really surprising which has better POI?

But yeah, Garmin has always suffered from out of date POI. I would only expect the gap to widen, as Garmin drifts farther and farther away from standalone gps units and more into sports, fitness and lord knows what else. But if people still were buying GPS'es for their cars, I'll bet Garmin would sell them. The fact is, people (largely) are not buying them. And looking at the .signatures of many members here, people are still using 10, 15 year old devices with lifetime maps where Garmin isn't making a cent.

Combine that with the aging demographic of places like here and I'd say the future for dedicated automotive devices is not looking very good. I will say, when compared to their other "boutique" products (like $700 handheld units), their automotive models almost look like bargains!

Admittedly, the database Garmin uses is updated less frequently than the ones used by smartphones, but using one is no guarantee of finding a new address. New businesses in my rural area still haven't shown up on either device and it's been close to a year. I'm sure this depends on where you drive.

Then there is the issue of old eyes and screen size. I have to pull over to use the smartphone or risk a ticket & fine. If I mount the phone on the dash to make it legal, I can't see or use the touch screen.

Yes, I can use Apple or Android car play on the in dash display for now. However, it's rumored that GM, in order to protect it's expensive to update nav system, will no longer support either in the near future. It remains to be seen if other car makers will follow suit.

I don't see me giving up my 8" Garmin any time soon.

Well, you are certainly Garmin's target market. And I understand, because I was just the same for many years (the picture I posted of my "Garmin museum" testifies to that). But it just starts looking like the Emperor has no clothes to me anymore. I still have two relatively recent devices (the DriveTrack 71 is the newest) and used them on and off until a couple years ago when I finally cut the cord. I'd say the final straw was when Garmin discontinued birdseye, which was the only reason I bought that device and within two or three years, it became an "orphan".

So, you made a good argument - and there's absolutely no need to justify doing what works well for you. But (just being philosophical) at what point does a dog reaize that it is getting kicked instead of just tripped over? Admittedly, it can be hard to tell the difference.

Most of your arguments might be characterized as Garmin conditioning. Don't like using a phone? Use carplay/android. Your favorite brand is dropping carplay/android? Vote with your feet. Or, just maybe, whatever alternative they offer might actually be OK? I mean, apparently it's all powered by Google, so we might expect something very similar to Google Maps, but possibly with deeper integration into the whole new "digital dashboard" in newer cars? For me, I don't really care, the last GM vehicle I owned was a 1982 Chevette! (seriously, LOL)

Don't like those options? Get a tablet and mount it in the car, then you can use any app you like. An iPad Mini might be good (I think it's about due for an update, so maybe it will get a brighter screen?). I am using an 11" m4 iPad Pro. 1000 nit screen is quite an improvement over my old gen 6 iPad, it's plenty bright for the car (admittedly, not a bright as my 7" Garmin;s (which surprised me when I put them side by side). But the image quality and contrast ratio is just far superior, which helps compensate. This is probably not a good choice for most people, but great for me as a developer since I can use boydsmaps on a big screen on the road.

Of course, you have a Garmin and are satisfied with it. End of story, be happy! But when you're ready to replace it, there are just SO many other options that don't chain you to Garmin's ecosystem which is - literally - dying. And when old guys like you and I also die, who will buy these things? (caveat: I plan to live forever, so probably it's just everyone else who is dying )

In spite of having both Apple and Google maps available I still favour my GPS, permanently mounted on my dash, not in my line of sight but where I can easily reach it.
Always on when the engine is on, shows me where I am and what streets etc are ahead. With the live traffic app shows me potential traffic issues. It keeps a list of previous locations I have gone to. There are lots of "improvements" and "deficiencies" but for me it works just fine And... for those addresses Garmin can't find I have SIRI.

I might find it easier to make the switch if I could find a way to enter 4000+ waypoints into my smartphone every time I take a trip.

That's an interesting point. What apps do you use? I have never really looked at waypoint options on smartphone apps. Is 4000 a lot? (serious question) I'm trying to finish up my own new search app for boydsmaps, it is working 165,000 POI that load right on to your phone, so all your searches are completely private and never sent back to the server. It should be easily able to handle 200,000 records when I release it, but I now have a plan to make it far bigger. Anyway, I have been wondering how many waypoints people actually use, I've never been a big fan of them myself in the past.

But the current version of boydsmaps can import standard .gpx waypoints in garmin format. This has all been working for a few years now and there are no limits to how many waypoints you can import/export.... however there could be a few caveats, mainly whether your phone can handle it. I suspect your computer can handle 4000 waypoints in boydsmaps, but phones really aren't as strong. Would be interested in hearing how many waypoints it can handle. When I tested, I still had an iPhone 6s! It had no problem with ~2,000 waypoints, but was slower than the same file on my computer. Then on a cheap Android phone, it worked but was very slow!

Of course, I don't provide routing and have better coverage in the Northeast US, but still full US coverage from the USGS. It's not the tool for planning your route, but might reveal a few interesting things along the way.

..absolutely no cell phone service. I had anticipated that I might have a problem so I had taken my Garmin along, just in case. I pulled the Garmin out of the back of the vehicle and fired it up. It laid in my route and got me to where I needed to go while my cell phone just laid there like a lump of coal. Sometimes, a GPS is better than any cell phone.

The major apps, like TomTom and HERE can also do that. You don't need any cell service, all the map data is stored on your phone, just like a Garmin GPS. Garmin used to have their own app and I used it for several years, it also had everything loaded on the phone and worked without cell service. But they discontinued that app. (Thanks, Garmin).

Mapfactor does the same and you can load custom pois to it. Goes on SD card. https://support.mapfactor.com/how-to/

Yeah, that is an advantage of Android phones with SD card slots for expansion (although a card is much slower than internal memory, in my own testing). But iPhones can't be expanded with cards, so if you don't have 4 or more GB of free space on your iPhone available for map data, that will be a problem with onboard maps. Or maybe you can just delete some of those cute puppy photos and free up enough space?

I'm an avid trail cyclist and usually have two Garmin's booted on my handlebars. I use one to constantly view a map, usually a Garmin topo, or one I downloaded from gpsfiledepot.com, and the other to view stats. I sometimes have over 4000 waypoints loaded at a time, depending on what trails I'm riding.

You can see some of the waypoint files I've created here:

http://www.poi-factory.com/user/103387

I sometimes have a dozen or more of these files loaded via Basecamp. I have yet to find a way to load that many waypoint files in a smartphone.

Another issue is, I found out the hard way that mounting a smartphone on bike handlebars isn't good for the phone due to vibration. I've damaged the cameras in two so far. I now carry the phone in my pocket.

BTW, if you know of any Garmin compatible maps that will allow me to create routable trail tracks, I would be very interested.

Sorry but routable maps are not something that interest me. There are some routable maps at gpsfiledepot, you can search for them here by checking the "routable" box and filter button

https://www.gpsfiledepot.com/maps/

I see that AdvOSM who recently joined here has made some routable maps, so he might be a better person to ask.

I decided not to get into routing at boydsmaps, because I think it introduces a whole different level of potential liability. If you look at a map and decide to turn onto a road, that's one on you. But if a website *tells* you to turn onto that road and something bad happens as a result..... No thanks, I'll leave it to Garmin, Google and their lawyers to deal with that!

Or maybe you mean something else by "create routable trail tracks". How would a map "allow" you to create routable tracks? Tracks are just a series of points that are connected, like recording waypoint but joining each to the previous one with a line segment. Making a "routable" road involves additional data and that is not passed to a track.

Didn't some Garmin GPS units have something called "Track Navigation"? That would let you use a regular, recorded track like a route and give you alerts for upcoming turns, etc. I never used that beyond trying it once or twice, I think on my Montana?

I have a problem with that also. Sometimes I just know the name of the restaurant but not the address. When I put the name in the GPS to search, it cannot find it. I then have to go on my phone to get the addres to put in the GPS. This happens with businesses that are not new but I don't know why Garmin would not have them in its maps.

I appreciate all your input, it has given me a slightly different perspective on my issues.

I understand your reluctance to get into routable maps but I don't see how it could create a legal issue. Just because you create a routable map doesn't dictate how an individual will use it. I can however see you being culpable if you created an actual route that put someone in jeopardy.

I use two Montana 700i handhelds on my bikes. Yes, they have a feature that will give you a crude route on trails that are already present on a certain compatible map. This is only partially useful for what I do.

Most of the trails I ride are somewhat obscure and don't appear on any map. I create my own tracks in Basecamp, mostly using 24K topo maps, and save them, along with thousands of waypoints, as .gdb or .gpx files.

I create these tracks in Google Earth Pro and save them as .kml or .kmz files, which I then import into Basecamp. I need a way to create and navigate a route between the waypoints I created along that track.

I agree, just creating a routable map is less of a risk than a website that actually tells you where to go. But there are people in this world that will at least try to sue you for some ridiculous things. They probably have no way of winning, but you need to put up with the inconvenience and probably pay a lawyer to get rid of them. Have seen examples of this myself, although not with routable maps. But anyway, I run a mapping website, so if I supported routing then it *would* be me handing out the turn by turn directions. And that's why I won't do it (plus the fact that it's boydsmaps and not boydsroutes )

I certainly wasn't suggesting that you shouldn't try to create your own routes, that makes complete sense for your usage. I just don't do that kind of thing myself, and am still a little confused when you say something like " they have a feature that will give you a crude route on trails that are already present on a certain compatible map". That is just probably due to my ignorance of how routes work "under the hood". But I would think anything you create from a track on the gps itself would be completely independent of the map your are using.

That does raise an interesting point however. In Mapsource, you could create routes by just manually bullding them point by point, independently of any roads on the map. But if you used that route on a routable map, then it would combine the points you set with routing data from the map to generate a route following the roads. If you used that same route on a non-routable map, it would just guide you in a straight line to the next waypoint. So, the route itself didn't "understand" the routing, but it provided some data to "feed" the routing logic in the map and gps itself.

Now, somewhere along the line, Garmin made some changes there. I think these only came from automotive devices (probably the Nuvi series, at that time). But these new "routes" were very different, and if you created a route on the device from a routable map, the route actually *became* a map itself! In other words, if you drove down oak street, turned left on elm and then entered the highway at exit 12, your "route" was actually a map of those road segments

I even remember a discussion (at gpsfiledepot, probably) where popej (the author of gmaptool) raised the question of whether these "routes" actually contained proprietary, copyrighted data since they were copies of features from the City Navigator map!

Fascinating subject, and you will probably learn a lot more than you expected if you dig deep enough. I will be interested in reading about it, just not interested in *doing* it myself!

“… the trails I ride … don't appear on any map. I create my own tracks in Basecamp, mostly using 24K topo maps, and save them, along with thousands of waypoints … I need a way to create and navigate a route between the waypoints I created along that track.”

I downloaded your 2018 “Heritage Rail Trail & Torry C Brown Rail Trail” GPX file and see it is 66 km (41 mi) long and has 266 waypoints and 2747 trackpoints, one about every 24 m (80 ft).

I think you have three options.

1. Garmin turn-by-turn routing. It follows the roads and tracks that exist in your map and allows up to 50 routepoints per route. It will work if your trails that didn’t appear on your map have since been uploaded to OSM and you use an OSM-based map. However, 50 routepoints in 41 meandering miles may not be enough to follow your the track. You can condense either 2747 trackpoints or 266 waypoints to 50 trackpoints and convert them to routepoints using GPS Babel. Garmin will give you turn-by-turn instructions along either the shortest or fastest way (your GPS setting) to the next routepoint about a mile away. It’s unlikely to give you exactly the route you want if there are many alternative paths in that area. But at least it will catch up to your route 50 times.

2. Garmin direct routing. It allows up to 250 routepoints per route but it completely ignores maps and draws a straight line between two points. You can condense either 2747 trackpoints or 266 waypoints to 250 trackpoints and convert them to routepoints using GPS Babel. You’ll get a zigzag with approximately 900 ft legs that crosses your route 250 times.

3. Garmin navigate to track. The most accurate and also easiest way to follow your route is to navigate to the GPX track that you already uploaded to POI Factory, with all your waypoints visible on the screen as points of interest. This is useless on fast roads (I tried it) but it works well at slow speeds on trails (I use it sometimes).

PS, you can't use AdvOSM Road Maps because they don't show cycle paths unless they allow motor vehicles (in which case they are shown as tracks) or pedestrians (in which case they are shown as footpaths).

Just my two cents worth ....