Route Planning
An ordered collection of points may be expressed as a track or a route. Conceptually, tracks are a record of where a person has been, routes are suggestions about where they might go in the future.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPX)
Whatever the software, at some point while designing your route you will need to decide which format you plan to store it on the GPS: route or track?
Conceptually correct or not I find it is far easier following a track, as it equates more directly with the traditional touring approach of a route planned beforehand using a detailed map of the area. It allows you to pick out the exact route you want to take and leaves very much less to chance.
Following a route will usually involve the GPS in the navigation process on the day, which isn't always ideal on a bike (as I discovered on a trip in Norway when my GPS cleverly found me a 10KM shortcut to the planned destination, as long as I cycled across a lake).
There are also sound storage and performance reasons to choose tracks over routes:
- Most GPS units are capable of storing 10,000 track points, usually enough to draw a highly accurate 3,000KM line from A to B or much further if you don't need to document every single turn. However, the 1,000 way point limit can pose more of a problem when trying to describe the entire route.
- Using track points for navigation keeps the waypoint memory free for highlighting points of interest along the way or adding them on-the-fly during the journey.
- Turn by turn route navigation is far more processor intensive than following a track, which will have a negative on the battery run time.
For these reasons the advice contained in these pages relates to navigation based on tracks rather than routes.
