Intro and background
GPS Requirements for Cycle Touring
Garmin NUVI 550
Garmin BaseCamp
Waypoint Strategies
Conclusions
Contact - additional links

A number of years ago, I bought a Garmin Edge 800 for cycling and cycle-touring.

After evaluating it for a number of days, I found :

• it could not create a route without a laptop
• it had a number of annoying bugs (of which I can't remember now ..)
• it was a very expensive cycling computer (speed, distance, cadence etc.) with the ability to save a track file or follow a pre-loaded track file
• BUT it was very poor at navigating you from waypoints or assisting you in cycle touring with changes on-the-fly

.. so I returned it and ask a friend what he was using.

He introduced me to the Garmin NUVI 550 (500 is USA) which is a waterproof GPS designed for a motorcycle but works great on a bicycle.

After 3 years of creating routes with this unit, I've decided I have learned enough to share some of my strategies with others. So here goes ...

GPS Requirements for Cycle Touring

Basically, here are my requirements for a GPS while cycle touring with panier's and no laptop:

• waterproof
• has enough battery life for a full day of cycling of approx. 8 hours
• USB charging with small USB adapter shared with other tech gear
• ability to alter an existing route or create a new route on the GPS without the need for a laptop
• ability to load from a large list of pre-designed routes without the need of a laptop
• map display and route display showing direction and turns on GPS
• backup battery or charging source while cycling on-route
• voice announcements of turns etc.
• ability to drop waypoints as they become irrelevant during a re-calculate in case we change our route on-the-fly.
• ability to start cycling the route part way through without having to tell the GPS to drop waypoints or define a new start point.

Although the NUVI 550 is no longer available, it is useful to understand what made it useful and how I use it cycle touring.

The NUVI 550 (500 for USA maps only) is basically a standard car GPS that happens to be waterproof.

It has a replaceable battery and a slot for additional flash memory that has enough capacity to store a huge number of Garmin map regions and routes.

It has a battery life of about 4 hours which is not quite enough for most days we cycle.

My friends approach to this problem is to simply replace the battery with a backup battery when it runs dry.

My approach has been to turn off the unit when the next way point (via in Garmin terminology) is more than ~3Km away and then note the odometer reading on my bike computer and calculate when I should turn it back on. Because the Garmin turns on and loads in about 30 seconds, this works surprisingly well. Also, because the Garmin can catchup to its current location on route, there are never any hick ups. Using this on/off strategy, I can often get two days of riding on a single charge. I also bring the spare battery.

You can now see why setting waypoints strategically on a route can effect how often I have to turn on and off the GPS. To this end, I don't want a route with an excessive number of waypoints as I would never turn off the unit. You can also see that if the route has many turns the battery life will be less as I am less likely to turn off the unit as often. In practice, this has not been an issue. There are always long stretches of 10Km or more of road that easily conserve the required energy to make the battery last.

My recent strategy for setting waypoints has been to put the waypoint past the turn or point of interest by 100m or so. If I put the waypoint in the middle of a road segment, then I will have to turn on the GPS more often - or scroll to the next turn/announcement to see past the waypoint to decide how long to turn off the GPS. Possible but more fiddling while riding!

Garmin BaseCamp

Although I wanted the ability to create and alter routes while touring with the NUVI 550 on a bicycle without having to cart around a laptop, much of the initial route preparation I do with the Garmin laptop software before the trip. I can then modify waypoints or create new routes on the road if need be, but at least I have a base set of routes to start with.

I use BaseCamp as it is the more recent of the Garmin route-creation s/w packages, and, after a frustrating learning curve, I've come to live with it - with few hick-ups.

A few BaseCamp tips:

• Although Garmin presents your routes on the left pane as if they are files in a directory, they are not. Directories and 'Files' are simply grouping mechanisms to categorize your routes. Play around with this to make sure you understand it and do backups of your routes.
• I always use car mode. If you use bicycle mode and you go faster than 30Km down a hill, the NUVI 550 will pop up a message saying that you must now be in a car and ask you if you want to switch to car mode!!! The other problem with bicycle mode is it will not let you cross a freeway in the USA. There are often 4 lane highways in Virginia where you need to cross them or even go down one side for 100m to jog across to follow the county road. This is perfectly safe and expected .. except Garmin will not let you do this in bicycle mode.
• I always use shortest distance because I'm interested in quiet roads and don't want the GPS routing me on high speed roads. I actually don't know if this makes too much difference as I usually define the route well with waypoints.
• When I start to create a route and click on the start location I then use the '+' and '-' keys to zoom in and out as required. You need window 'focus' for these keys to work so sometimes you have to click on the screen to get that focus. Remember, you can always use 'ctrl-z' to undo an action! I also use the 'arrow' keys on the keyboard to pan left-right, up-down. This leaves the mouse controlling only the position of the next waypoint which seems simpler.
• It is usually easier to place roughly the right number of waypoints down to get the general outline of the route and then fine tune with the 'insert point' and 'move point'. I can usually define a route in about 8 to 15 waypoints for a 100Km route.
• On a laptop with a touch pad, you will want to use the left button key when moving a point. Select the waypoint you want to move and then click and hold the left button and move the point with the touch pad mouse and drop it where you want it. Trying to use a double-tap to do this only works 'sometimes' and will drive you crazy.
• There are probably alot of different strategies people use for 'where' to place a waypoint, but I have settle on this: I always place the waypoint beyond the point of interest. i.e. a couple 100 metres past a turn or the other side of a town on the route I want to take out of town.
• I then look at the result, usually with the 'erase' mode ( because as you move the mouse over a waypoint a big X comes up), and I decide if I have too many waypoints. If I decide to delete a point that looks redundant, BaseCamp will recalculate and I may suddenly have an altered route in which case I use 'ctrl-z' to get back. See Waypoint Strategies.
• If my start point and end point are the same (because it is a loop), I always place the end point well away from the start so that the GPS starts the route before seeing the end point. If I don't do this, the NUVI 550 will pick up the end-point first and say I have arrived at my destination - and then I have to re-load the route and start again!
• Lastly, I double click on the route on the left pane and it brings up a route cue sheet and I step through each waypoint on the route and fine-tune the placement of the waypoint. The idea is to remove any false-stubs or U-turns that can result when you placed the waypoints at a birds-eye view. I can also move them past the intersection so the NUVI 550 calls the intersection (left/right) first then the waypoint.
• Then I click on the stats and see the length of the route and I give the route a concise name that is not too long for the GPS to display when loading.
• Also, I always make sure the calculated length of the route is in the name - usually the last word like '96Km'. This is so I can check to see if the GPS loads and calculates the route similarly to BaseCamp.
  

NOTE: when I load the route in NUVI 550, I always do an "edit/recalculate/shortest distance" to make sure the route comes out the same distance and shape as BaseCamp.

Sometimes it does not (because of slight algorithm differences) and so I then know I was too sparse in my usage of waypoints!

The other reason to do this is that the NUVI 550 will re-calculate if you deviate from the route, which is what you want, so better to know before you start riding if there is a re-calculate difference between the GPS and BaseCamp!

Waypoint Strategies

When I first started placing waypoints to define a route, I placed them at the intersection of roads or the middle of a town. What I found was that often I would get a 'Make a U-Turn' from the GPS as I would come into the intersection. The other thing that would happen is that the NUVI 550 would not tell me if I was coming to a turn - just that I was approaching a waypoint - and then it would tell me to turn as I came onto the intersection.

The other thing I found is that often I would have no interest in where I passed through a town, I just wanted to make sure I came out the other end on the right road! Sometimes we would stop for lunch, take in a museum etc. and deviate from the 'centre' of the town. It would no longer made sense to go back to a waypoint placed in the centre of town. Also, sometimes the map data did not correctly identify one-way roads and throwing a waypoint in the middle of that mess only made things more confusing! So putting the waypoint on the other side of the town seems to be the best strategy and will always get you out of town on the road you want to be on!

The other strategy I tried was putting the Waypoint in the middle of the road segments I was interested in. This actually makes some sense as I choose roads to ride that are interesting (or so I think!). This also makes sense from a symmetry perspective because if you decide to 'reverse' the route direction, you probably still have the waypoints in the optimal positions. The only problem I had with this approach is I would be less likely to turn off the GPS to save power as my GPS would want to tell me about the waypoints as well as the intersection turns.

I finally have decided that the best strategy, as stated earlier, is to place the waypoint 100-200m past the intersection (or town).

Using this strategy, the NUVI 550 tells me when the next intersection is (in kilometres) and if it is a left or right turn. I usually then turn off the GPS and turn it back on when I get to the intersection, confirm the turn, ride until the waypoint announces, hear the distance to next turn and I can then decide if I want to turn off the GPS to save power.

The only problem with this strategy is if you want to reverse the route direction you probably want to move all the waypoints to the other side of the intersections!

Conclusions

• By taking the limitations of the Garmin NUVI 550 into account, it is possible to adopt a tools and navigation strategy that makes this GPS a very capable and useful navigation aid for cycle touring and day cycling in general.
• Because the GPS limitations described are so specific to the Garmin NUVI 550 (which is now many years out of date from Garmin's current technology), it is likely that a new strategy would need to be devised for the purchase of a new GPS. Never the less, there are many ideas and solutions here that would help in deciding how to deploy a new GPS solution.

If you see an error in anything I have stated here, please let me know and I will correct it!

If you disagree with any statements I've made, please contact me and let me know your thoughts!

Please send comments and suggestions to: hb [at] nordicwind [dot] ca

Harold Blount - rev: 2014 April 29

Additional links:

• OsmAnd - GPS navigation on an Android Smartphone - tips, features and pros/cons
  
• Garmin Edge Touring PLUS - evaluation of this low(er) cost Cycling GPS
  
• Garmin Edge 810 - evaluation
  
• GP-Sana - my GPS Analysis website - routes I share with friends ;)
  
• OsmAnd - OsmAnd website