Plotting routes before a trip

Hi All,

New member here and new to the whole GPS thing. I have a Garmin GPS 18x USB antenna, nRoute and City Navigator South Africa installed on my laptop. (Dell Inspiron 1420 with Vista)

I take church groups over to differant places in Southern Africa once/twice a year and have been using paper maps in the past! I would now like to pre-plan or plot my routes using the GPS and with different start/stop places before I go next time and start using my laptop.

I.E. point A to point B, point B to point C, point C to point D- etc

Is it possible to do that using what I have installed? Any hints on how to proceed? I know everything works becouse I found out this afternoon I am 10,380 miles from Johannesburg Airport....

Thanks for any help at all,

Alan

Hi Alan,

Yes, you can do that with MapSource and nRoute.

It sounds like you have discovered how to create a route in MapSource. It's really dead simple. Just click on the Route tool on the toolbar, or TOOLS > Route in the menus.

If you want a single route to cover everything, Click on Point A, click on Point B, click on Point C, etc. When you have clicked on the final point, right-click somewhere on the map away from the route and click on Cancel (or type the ESC key) to end the route. The route will remain and now you can either play with it or save it.

If you want Point A to Point B to be a trip and Point B to Point C to be a seperate trip and Point C to Point D to be yet another trip, just grab the route tool, click Point A and Point B, then end the route. Click Point B again and Point C, then end the route. You should now have a second route listed on the Routes tab.

If you right-click on any route and select Properties you can change the name and do a variety of things to manipulate the route. If you want to force it to go through a particular place you can either insert that place in the Properties screen or if you know at the time you are creating the route that there are places you want to be sure to go through, you can click on them before you click on the last stop.

There's lots more that you can do on the Properties screen, including look at the directions tab and add notes on the notes tab.

When you are ready to use them in nRoute there is one critical thing you need to know. nRoute won't use routes (or waypoints or tracks) that are just saved in MapSource. You need to import them into nRoute to use them. MapSource saves its files, by default, in the GDB version 3 format. But nRoute only knows the GDB version 2 format. So any files you want to use in nRoute you must Save As *.GDB Version 2 and then import them into nRoute.

Have fun. Holler if you run into problems.

...ken...

cool - off to the movies with my kids but I know what I will be thinking about...try it later tonight.

Thanks!

Alan

Ken,

Works like a charm! Thank you!

Alan

Y'er welcome. I luv it when a plan comes together...

...ken...