Garmin Zumo XT

[raesewell]

I have taken advantage of the long standing Bennetts Bike Social discount and bought a Garmin Zumo XT with a saving of £92.50
which in anyones book is a real bargain. I had a Zumo 660 some years ago and thought it was a bit of a sledge hammer to crack a walnut. I have been a long time Tomtom user and get on with it very well, but there were a few features of the XT that interested me. Namely the announcing and non announcing route points or soft and hard points, also the soft points are called shaping points. It's still early days and I have not used it out on the road yet. I have done a lot of reading over the last couple of days now my brain hurts. I am interested to see how it behaves when you go off route so I have plotted a local route that I know and I intend to go off route to see what it does. I'll keep using the Tomtom Rider 550 until I am up to speed with the Zumo XT.
Wish me luck.

[Phmode]

If you had said Rae, I would have given you a MUCH better discount on my barely used crap Garmin XT.

Why, I am tempted to give it away but I don't hate anyone enough to inflict it on them. I might even swap it for a broken TomTom 400...

[raesewell]

Funny you should say that Brian after your comments in another thread I did think of making you an offer  but went with the Bennetts offer in the end. As I said after a lot of reading I am getting to understand how the XT brain works.

There is a dedicated forum to the Garmin Zumo family. There is an article there that a very nice gentleman has put a lot of time trouble and effort into writing so I thought it only polite to take the time to read it. It's very informative and goes some was to help understand the XT brain. It's a long read but if you have the time and patience it will benefit you.
Give it a try. 

https://www.zumouserforums.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=1464

[Matt]

Ah I hope it goes well Rae. After playing around with Brian's XT I really want it to be decent, or patchable to make decent, as I think it's one of very few (or maybe the only one) dedicated nav hardware platforms that have finally made it to using Android. So it really has no excuse, or much less of an excuse, than the proprietary ones we've all struggled with for so long.

Ah he has a whole section on MyRouteApp. Reading now.

[Matt]

And this seems the key, and if I recall, something we belatedly discovered!

GPX v1.2 (route, track, POI)

This version transfers the route exactly as it was plotted on the MRA map - assuming you were using the HERE maps provided with MRA Gold.
The Shaping Points are all stripped out of the route, and the gpx file contains only the Start, Finish and Via Points.
However, v1.2 uses the route point extensions to plot the map on the Zumo precisely as it was sent (as does Basecamp), so providing that the route does not recalculate, it will be exactly as was plotted on the screen.

And this

Shaping points are important. If you deviate from your route and rejoin it after missing a shaping point, then the stanav will let you continue. It will nag you in the meantime. If you turn off-route recalculation OFF, then when you deviate the satnav goes quiet. It doesn't say a word. And when you rejoin, even after missing out a lot of shaping points, it will just come out of its sulk and navigate you ahead. Not so if you miss Via Points - so placement of Via Points should really be reserved for stopping places - or just after the start of the next section after a stop.

Ok finally this, where he goes on to say 1.1 is the better choice for export, as it allows for the above.

Which MRA method would I choose ?

Until I know more about when the XT recalculates (and the 590 and 595) I am not happy with v1.2 which removes the shaping points.

I was always an advocate of Basecamp and had the settings such that both Basecamp and the Zumos would produce very similar routes.

But that is no longer the case. The XT seems to want to head for faster roads, and it will take a much longer route (in time as well as distance) in order to get to one. That seems to be the main routing algorithm, rather than taking a bit extra time to come up with whichever route is actually faster. So the route that is selected by Basecamp or MRA or any other mapping program is irrelevant. The XT is almost certainly going to produce something different. The problem then becomes one of - where do I need to route points in order to force the XT to take these roads. And for that, you only need to transfer the ALL of the route points and the track.

And that is exactly what MRA's gpx v1.1 provides. I hate that the XT then has to calculate the route - it takes time, but it does this much faster without an existing route in place !

[Phmode]

I'll read the article Rae, but I'm done with Garmin.

Firstly they have produced a device which is unusable on a Mac. Unless of course you download a 3rd party piece of software that Garmin does not own nor control and that could disappear at any moment. How ifn dare they?

Secondly, they took all the great features of the 660 and binned them; the ability to have useful data points on the screen at the same time, clock, heading etc. etc. and gave only the choice of items to show in one box.

They have on-screen and audible warnings for bends ahead that you can clearly see if you (or rather the average US driver) bothered to look out of the windscreen instead of at the 'device' and which you cannot cancel; well, you can kill the sound but not the visuals. It's just visual noise which I find distracting and for almost everyone in this forum that I have ridden with, utterly pointless. I do like the advance notice of speed limit changes. I always like the Welsh advance speed limit warnings which (almost) stop one barrelling into a 30 limit because the sign is hidden by overgrown roadside vegetation or is just around a bend.

They seem to have killed the ability to load the PocketGPSWorld speed database in a meaningful  way. The icons showing the upcoming locations are microscopic on the screen and not easily seen at first glance (unless this has been fixed recently) and anyway, I need to use that stupid piece of non-Garmin software to load it on my Mac.

Next, most of the stuff you (well, I) want to do is only accessible by delving into the menus rather than being intuitively accessible from the home or map screen.

Then, they overload the device with stuff that about 1% of users (and you and the guy you reference in your post may be among that 1%) may use but that most folk neither want nor need. They killed my 660 with an over large download consisting mainly of on-screen adverts for places I will never go and I can see them doing the same with XT. Of course, being Android based may make it impervious to the Garmin geeks, time will tell, for you but not for me.

My future (lifetime membership bought and paid for) lies firmly with MRA and their Navigation Next, a phone instead of a dedicated sat nag and a nifty set of BarButtons currently being built and installed, separately, by myself and Richard for his first foray into sat nagism. This will give us the ability to hack the screen-touch issues associated with a phone by using the physical bar mounted buttons much like the old Streetpilot series back in the day and similar to the BMW Nav buttons.

The MRA stuff is not exactly as intuitive as the previous generations of Garmin devices but is getting better through the Beta testing programme and is a world away from the TYRE of old.

I was seriously surprised to read about you going over to the dark side, I must say, as I always thought you had TomTom dna coursing through your veins, but I know how much you love a challenge so good luck with the XT.

[raesewell]

With regard to PGPSW and the CamerAlert app, I have been in touch with Matthew (the new owner of PGPSW) about getting the app working again with the latest Android systems and put him in touch with Richard, so fingers crossed 

[alaskier]

SatNavs eh? Like all modern tech when they are good they are very very good but when they are bad they are horrid! Took a few weeks to get to grips with my TomTom 500 but nowadays I would not be without it (unless I bite the bullet and buy one of those new K1600GTs)

[Phmode]

Because I haven't been updating my the database on the XT I didn't realise that the place had changed hands. The CamerAlert app works fine on i devices but I don't know if the new database each week is 'actually' updated. There is a section of A40 around the top of Gloucester which has had ongoing roadworks for a couple of years with speed limits going up and down like a fiddler's elbow and now the app just keeps saying 'Unknown speed limit' even though it has been 70 for the last 6 months or so.

[raesewell]

Report the speed limit and you might get a free years subscription. I got a free year a couple of years ago for being the first to report a new camera, but in those days it was easy to do on the app.

[Phmode]

It's true.

I got an 'offer' of a free year's subscription about four years ago. I remember thinking 'this is a scam' but I couldn't work out how. When I contacted them to query it they said it was genuine and that I had reported a speed camera in the central reservation of the N10, northbound, south of Les Sablons.

That was, like 6 years beforehand and I had forgotten all about it. They apologised and explained that they did not have any verifiers in the region but it had been reported by another member so I got the free hear.

I don't know how to report a wrong speed limit in the app cos I am always driving when it is on... 

[Phmode]

...and come to think of it Rae, it was through the Bennett's offer that I bought my XT, so that shows how long it has been running.

[raesewell]

After using the XT for a few months now I have sold the Tomtom.
I will also be upgrading my comms and going for the Cardo Packtalk Edge.

[Phmode]

Blimey Rae. The foundations of the old hovel are fairly shaking from the seismic shock. I mean, not too many folks in here realise that your middle name is TomTom and I know you swore me to secrecy, but like I said, blimey!

[raesewell]

I have a sneaky suspicion that Tomtom might be pulling out of the domestic market, although there have been unconfirmed rumours that a new model might be on the horizon. I don't believe the rumours.