help with gps issues

[fatleon]

I gota Garmin etrex 10 (the yellow one) without doing enough research. Turns out it only has 8mb of storage and can't be expanded. It's fine for local stuff and has served me well, but I'm going ona longer trip soon. So i got an etrex Vista hcx and the cheapest micro SD I could find (16gig).

I have 2 problems with it though. 1) I can load maps onto it, but it doesn't show all the detail on the maps, like trails. Also i haven't figured out how to get osm maps on there.

Problem 2) it won't hold tracks longer than 500 points. I found a program that will split tracks into small pieces. It works for some of them, but none of the ones from bikepacking.com will open in the program.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

[NatHC]

Hi there,

I can help with problem #1:

The new version of Garmin Basecamp and Garmin MapInstall are broken, you'll need to uninstall them and re-install the older version. I was having the exact same issue on my etrex 20. Here's a tutorial for how to solve the problem:

https://openmtbmap.org/tutorials/basecamp-4-7-0/

Good luck!

[fatleon]

Wow, that did the trick, thanks so much!
I got a 500 point version of the route I'm gonna do, that with now having the good map should have me in good shape.

[AZTtripper]

Glad to here you got one of your issues sorted out.

I am not fully versed in the newest units, but you should not be limited to 500 points by the GPS or your mapping program. The older units all had the ability to load 10,000 points in 20, 500 point segments. I have always used http://topofusion.com/ TopoFusion is run by ScottM the creator of this website. The demo version will do what you need, first download a full track from Bikepacking.com then you need to use the Simplify/Split/Spline Track feature.

However big the downloaded track is, using the pan map (the hand symbol) right click and choose Simplify/Split/Spline track, first simplify it to 10,000 and then split it into equal pieces. Then it should all load into the GPS just fine. Using the free demo version you can only load 3 tracks at once and you'll be stuck with some of the map showing a demo square, moving the map moves the square so you can see everything if your patient.

Hope that helps
Tim

[fatleon]

Cool, I'll give that a try.

Thanks