Connected to BaseCamp to Navigator VI

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Wapping

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I asked the Connected app to give me an ‘twisty’ route of about 83 miles from London E1 to Walker’s cafe at Mildenhall, which it did in seconds. I then exported the GPX file to BaseCamp on my large Mac. The route (BaseCamp shows it as a track) displayed perfectly. I then asked BaseCamp to convert the track into a route. This caused BaseCamp to crash several times, which is quite unusual, not least as the Mac I use is pretty powerful.

I gave up on this simple idea, deciding to spend 5 minutes or so rubber banding over the track to create the route myself. Whilst doing this I found what I think might have been the problem. In deepest rural Essex, the Connected track takes a few hundred yards or so of what BaseCamp thinks is unmade road. One of the few avoidances I have set is ‘unmade roads’. A quick look on Google Street View (what a great invention that is) showed the road - it’s a lane really- to be rideable, basically a car wide, with grass up the middle.

Here’s the Connected track, which I coloured cyan, just to make it stand out:

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Here’s the Google Street View, as the camera car went along the lane. It’s certainly a small country lane that can be ridden on any motorbike from a 1600 to a FireBlade.

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I de-selected the avoidance and forced the magenta line along the lane. All was then well. Here it is, in magenta glory:

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I then sent the BaseCamp file of the route and the track to my Navigator VI by dragging it across. This is usually all but instantaneous; this time it took about a minute to transfer. I then fired up the Navigator VI and imported the route from the device’s memory into Trip Planner. This too took about a minute but it did it in the end, reproducing the route perfectly. The track transferred perfectly, too.

What have I learned?

A. As is not uncommon, a route / track created in one software is not (despite GPX) always perfect when transferred into another block of software. The Connected route took a lane which, due to my settings, was causing a problem.

B. I live in East London, a very congested and built up area of London. The ‘twisty’ route offered up by the Connected app is bonkers and not the tidy way out of London that I would take. But that does not surprise me at all. I will ride it anyway, as a part of my ongoing enquiry to how the Connected app and the small TFT screen in my 850 work together. I will be helped with some of the route’s ‘left, right, right, left’ instructions (tricky in town) as I will for once use my in-ear monitors.

C. I think that had I just left everything in Connected and run the TFT screen, with no back-up via my Navigator VI, it would all be fine. I will find out tomorrow.

D. Had I not been reasonably proficient in BaseCamp, I might have got a bit frustrated and binned it when the crashes occurred.

E. Had I not been reasonably patient with the Navigator VI and the slower than usual transfer and importation into Trip Planner, I might have binned that too, cursing at “Garmin shite….”

Here’s the Garmin route / track file if anyone wants to have a look at it and play about:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s77l63s5n...cted-20211210-212101-Beta-to-Walkers.GPX?dl=0


PS I suspect the weather won’t be quite so bright and sunny tomorrow. Here it is for Steeple Bumpstead, which is just down the road from the lane pictured above:

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Even so, I’ve seen worse.
 
Very interesting. Thanks for doing the investigative work.
 
You mention that Basecamp crashing whilst trying to convert a track to a route is unusual but I've experienced the same on a couple of occasions, and as you did, worked around it. The point you've made previously about the potential for glitches when mixing systems/software/apps is true.

I keep my fingers crossed that future updates of Basecamp will iron out such issues!
 
Thank you both.

I rarely mix softwares, if I can avoid it. The most common times I do is when I download a route or track from one of the German magazines or try to help *any bod on UKGSer who is struggling with a route / BaseCamp / their Garmin device, which is most commonly due to their having used MyRoute or something similar in the first place. The crash (and my assumed cause if it) did not surprise me. Previous routes I have created in the Connected app have loaded up in BaseCamp and on my Navigator VI just fine.

Now that it’s just about light in this corner of London E1, I am off to test the route, using the beta version of the Connected app. I’ll therefore miss the Formula 1 but have set the box to record and will do my best to avoid knowing the result. Knowing my luck, it’ll record ‘Britain is dancing to the BakeOff tune’ or some other garbage.


* As do many others.
 
Enjoy your trip up to Walkers, Mr W. A very regular hangout for those of us up here… be careful though, it may constitute a Biker Meet ;):D
 
Made it, across and along some very small roads in Essex and Suffolk. Now and again I met bits of road that I recognised but it wasn’t very often. Once I was out of London at about Leytonstone, I guess I saw 10 cars in 70 miles. The Connected app behaved all but perfectly.

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Excellent! Glad you managed to get out even if it wasn’t bone dry :)

I’ll have a play with that GPX file a bit later; I’ve never encountered a crash in BaseCamp (tempts fate) but I’m all for trying to break stuff!
 
Thank you.

There was no rain all day and the temperature (before the sun went down) sat at a not too bad for December 15 degrees. The sun even came out when I got within 5 miles of Walkers. It had clearly rained like hell on Saturday or over the days previously, with all the streams overflowing. I came home straight down the A11 / M11 / A406 /A13 in and hour and a half. The windy roads way out, took four hours, by way of comparison. If I went that way again, I’d nip the fastest way to the outskirts of London at Leytonstone and then pick up the twisty route from there. The Pro-Version of Kurviger has the option to create single routes with a mixture of riding modes, which is quite neat. For example, I could ask it for home to Leytonstone by the fastest route and, in the same breath, then ask it to tack on Leytonstone to Walkers, via twisty roads.

The route out of London was, shall we say ‘Interesting’ taking in a bit of the Olympic park at Stratford. I am glad I fired up my earphones and ran my phone stuffed into the map case of my tank bag, as trying to rely entirely on the no map / basic arrow of the small TFT screen is difficult in heavy traffic on smaller London roads. It’s also really hard in the dark, if you don’t know where yiu are going.

The lack of a direction arrow, with the insistence on roundabouts of only numbering the exits, is just silly.

The voice instructions were really clear, not least (if you don’t have the map screen) you get a tip as to what comes after the turn.
 
Glad it was a mostly positive experience!

I have to say I find relying on the TFT symbols very difficult especially as when I started I didn’t have the headset either.

Whatever app I’m using I prefer at least a basic map to glance at just to make sure I’m roughly on the right road.
 
Thank you.

Stuffing my phone into map carrier of my tank bag and keeping it powered (the Connected app is power hungry) was a stroke of genius. The reason why is simple. I have a brand new, fresh out of the box, second generation ‘Make life a ride’ Nav VI, whose screen jumped all over the place and was unresponsive to finger touches. Eventually I gave up with the thing when the screen went a lurid shade of green. It will be going back to BMW this week, when I go down to order the phone cradle and the different GPS mounting bracket for the 850, along with some rubber inserts for the shark tooth footrests.

The ironic thing is that I only took the Nav VI as a back-up, in case my phone failed and therefore the Connected app, too. This time my phone / app saved me, when the dedicated GPS device failed. Funny old world.

I thought the map / route displayed by the Connected on my phone was really clear, despite the phone sliding around in the map case of my tank bag. I also thought the voice instructions (I rarely use any sound) were really clear and easy to understand, too.

10/10 for the Connected app

0/10 for Garmin….. and I’m a big Garmin fan.
 
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