It really is best to keep the number of waypoints to a minimum, only those places you actually need to go to. Use shaping points (via points in Mapsource) instead.
John
A very sensible piece of advice.
Just to remind everyone who might have forgotten or those that do not know:
1. A waypoint is an electric point or beacon, through which you have told your GPS device you MUST pass through. They come from navigation in otherwise featureless surroundings. For example, an aeroplane flying above the clouds, a ship sailing on an open ocean or a motorbike riding across the desert sands, may need to make a turn at a specific point or pass through a set point in order to satisfy the rules of a race. There is no marker hanging in the air, no buoy bobbing in the ocean or signpost in the desert, so an electronic one is made.
As you, the owner, have told your GPS device that you MUST go through the electronic point, it will do its very best to ensure that you do. Therefore your device will keep rerouting (particularly if you have auto-recalculate turned on) back until you do. The latest devices have worked out that some riders when out hooning will decide to miss a waypoint on purpose, so will get very annoyed when the device keeps taking them back to go through it; the dumb device not being a mind reader. Garmin have added two buttons to cater for riders' changes of mind: The 'skip waypoint' button and a function in preferences that allows the device to automatically skip waypoints if it decides that a rider is now so far off route that he must have decided in his own mind to miss the waypoint out. Tick the auto-skip function with caution as it may well override other preferences you have set. For example, it overrides an instruction the rider has given their device not to recalculate a route. It will recalculate (though you have told it not to) and may as a consequence alter the route you created so patiently.
2. A viapoint or shaping point is different. It is if you like an electronic drawing pin, that has been used to pin the magenta ribbon line of a route to a specific point on the map *. They appear when you create a route on your computer at home, either when you click on a road that you want the magenta line to go down or when you drag the magenta line to follow a certain road. Here it's worth pointing out that BaseCamp and Mapsource do things slightly differently. In Mapsource, the drawing pins are viapoints by default. In BaseCamp, the drawing pins are shaping points BUT the software - and as a consequence your GPS device - sees them as waypoints. This possibly explains why some bods see lots of waypoints in their GPS devices and get confused as to which ones they have passed through and which ones are still up ahead. The good news is that Mapsource and BaseCamp and the latest generation GPS devices allows the owner to change individual waypoints into a via/shaping point and back again to waypoint at will. There are lots of threads and posts on how to do this.... read them and / or read your expanded owner's manual in its downloadable form. BaseCamp on a Mac does flag up a possible error when a shaping point is placed off a known road shown on the map. It lists the point in the column on the left where waypoints live, with a number alongside it. Highlight the item in the list and ask BaseCamp to show it on the map. Drag the erroneous point back onto the road and clear the number from the list.
As you ride along the magenta line your device simply ticks off via/shaping points as you pass through them. If when you create your route, whether on the device or on your computer at home, you place the drawing pin off the road by accident, say in a field 20 yards off the road or in a side road that (because you didn't zoom the map in far enough you didn't know was there) the magenta line will go to it, without a doubt. Why? Because you have told the dumb device that you do want to go through a point 20 yards off the road or to that point in a side road; so it does just that, as it's been told to by you, the device's owner and master.
You can miss via/shaping points with impunity, though it follows that if you decide to miss the point that you (not the device) created 20 yards into a field or up the side road, you will drive - if only briefly - off the magenta line and, as a consequence, off route. Depending on how you have your GPS device set up and a number of other factors, your driving off route
might lead to a recalution of the route by the device. The consequences (if any) of the recalution will vary.... see lots of threads and posts about recalculation.
* Think of those old war films, with paper maps on the wall. The maps have ribbons on them, held place and shaped by drawing pins. The magenta line and the via/shaping points are just the same as the ribbon and drawing pins.
PS Bikermates who insist on creating their routes outside of BaseCamp or Mapsource, in for example MotoGoLoco, may encounter other strange phenomena when it comes to way/via/shaping points.These they will very often blame on Garmin and or on their dumb (but really very clever) GPS devices. Instead of asking the third party software provider for help - possibly because they know they won't get any or because they can't be arsed - they'll ask here, sometimes emphasing their demands for help by shouting a lot. Mix in that other owners decide to tell only half the story ( or change the pertinent details in their tale of woe quite remarkably as the thread develops) it's not surprising that some threads roll onto pages and pages......
