Garmin nRoute - a brief overview

Brief overview (full review will come later)

The following is a copy/paste from a Garmin webpage

• Brings Garmin's award-winning auto-routing navigation to your laptop, utilizing the larger screen to display a large map and easy-to-read directions.
• Performs turn-by-turn route assistance and previewing, including spoken turn reminders and automatic recalculation when off-route.
• Tracks your location using either north-up orientation or vehicle-direction up.
• Finds places and easily routes to all points of interest and addresses that your MapSource product provides.
• Allows you to customize the places that you want to find and route to quickly using 'Find'; for example, 'Nearest Gas' or 'Nearest Italian Food'.
• Provides driver with information, including upcoming cross-streets, street addresses, speed, bearing, and elevation.
• Provides multiple trip computers that allow you to track distance, time, and speeds for business or personal use.
• Allows importing and exporting of user data to and from MapSource files.
• Works with all MapSource products. Note that BlueChart and MetroGuide 5 or greater will not support some features.
• Designed for use with the GPS 18 and GPS 10, but will work with almost any Garmin GPS over serial or USB.
• Available to MapSource owners as a significant improvement and expansion of the real-time tracking capability. Takes advantage of your installed map product's capabilities. For example, you can find an address and it will auto-route on any auto-routing map, like City Navigator.

nRoute is a free program, but it includes no map data. Users will need buy Garmin map separatelly. Maps are available for many parts of the world. At the moment I'm not clear on the compatibility of various Garmin map products with nRoute. Perhaps someone who understands this can explain it. Here's a list of available map products from Garmin (some may not be compatible with nRoute).

Hi Marvin,

I'm sorry to be so tardy responding to this. I only just noticed the Garmin nroute forum. I've bookmarked the S&T forums and was going straight there. I don't even know why I checked the Software Discussions level just now.

Anyway, here's what I know about nroute. For those who already have a Garmin map product installed on their PC, nroute looks and behaves identically to MapSource in almost every respect except for the addition of the nav functions. So if you are used to working with MapSource to plan routes, build mapsets for your mobile device or similar activities, nroute will be very familiar.

(I'm not doing a detailed description of the portion of nroute that is identical to MapSource. Anyone who has MapSource is already familiar with it or can open it up and look at it themselves. Anyone who does not have a Garmin map product and MapSource won't have any use for nroute.)

The difference is that nroute is also a nav program. With the addition of a GPS receiver you can turn your laptop (or desktop!!) into a navigation device with all of the features you would expect.

The bottom third of the screen has a set of tabs that give you access to the typical sorts of screens you would expect to see on most Garmin nav devices. You can look at the satellite constellation and see which satellites nroute is seeing, the relative signal strengths, the current accuracy and your current position. On other tabs you can get lists of your personal waypoints (enter directly or import them), trip computers, tracks, saved routes, favorite finds, driving directions (if you have a route active) and status.

The status screen displays current information like speed, heading and elevation and displays a compass rose with your current heading on it. If you have a route active, it also displays the distance, time and ETA for the next maneuver and for the final destination.

Since it is based on MapSource, it will take any Garmin map product and, like MapSource, you can have multiple products available. When I installed nroute, I already had a number of Garmin map products installed on my PC from over four years of use. I have City Select NA v5 & v6, City Navigator NA v8, Topo Canada v2, Metroguide Canada v4 and a couple of transparent overlays of ATV trails in the Calgary area and in the Crowsnest Pass. When I first ran nroute immediately after installing it, all of the map products that I had installed were automatically available in nroute with no additional work. In nroute, as with MapSource, these are all available in a dropdown menu on the toolbar as well as from the VIEW menu (VIEW > Product).

I hope that helps expand a little bit on nroute. It's great for someone who already has Garmin maps, who is familiar with MapSource and who wants to turn their laptop into a full-blown nav device. All you need is a USB GPS receiver and a copy of Franson GPSGate.

...ken...

Ken, there is even more than just the "Software Discussions" , go one level up: www.laptopgpsworld.com .

Thanks much for the valuable info. I'm not familiar with nRoute. I was hoping to receive a review package from Garmin, but it still hasn't arrived for some reason. But I have been quite busy with other stuff, so I would unlikely be able to even look at it anyway.

However, I came across what I think is a good review of nRoute at http://www.gpsinformation.org/penrod/nroute/nroute.html Even though it was written a couple of years ago I think it may still be very much up-to-date since I suspect not much has changed, if anything, in the functionality of the program. Ken, since you are familiar with nRoute, would you be so kind to look at the review? If you think it is good and up-to-date, I will add it to the list of reviews of laptop GPS software programs.

Marvin,

I've reviewed the review, as you asked. I would make the following comments.

The review is getting a little old. The majority of it deals with the basics and so will remain relevant for the life of the program. It is only some details that will change from version to version.

View Menu (and Toolbar) > Map Orientation - When talking about North Up versus Track Up he makes the unqualified statement that you should set it to Track Up. There is no technical reason to do this. In fact this is a very personal preference and the user should set it to whatever is most comfortable. Those who use paper maps frequently might prefer using North Up. And when travelling East or West, using North Up will allow you to see farther "ahead" on a typical laptop screen.

NMEA - He says you can only use GPS devices that send Garmin's proprietary data stream. Today you can use Franson GPSGate and any NMEA-compliant GPS receiver. GPSGate will convert the NMEA data stream input from the GPS receiver to Garmin protocol for output to nroute.

EPE & DOP - I think Garmin must have changed this in recent versions. The version of nroute I have (2.7.6) includes an "Accuracy" box on the Satellites screen. I can't swear that nroute uses EPE and DOP but I can't imagine how it can compute the current accuracy of the position without them.

Those are all relatively minor nits in the grander scheme of things. Overall it is an excellent review with lots of very useful information. It also contains some useful screenshots to illustrate some of the features. I think it's worth linking to.

...ken...

Ken, thanks. I just posted the link to the review in the list of reviews of laptop GPS software programs. I will eventually write a review of the newer version, but at least it is not so urgent, since the existing review provides very good info to people interested in the product.