How to navigate a route with an etrex Vista HCx?

[latindane]

Hello everyone, newbie again. I switched from a venture to a vista, and bought five (!) microSD cards for $2.90 each (!!) so I have a lot of streets and topo data for a large area around where I'll be moving 

Now the question: I don't have city navigator, but can easily map the route that I want to drive using the ibycus street maps (or to hike using the topo). My problem is: how do I have the vista map my route AND center the display on my current position (so that I can visually follow the route even if I can't get guiding prompts to work)?

I searched for "navigate routes" and only came up with two hits about transparent maps (which I have no clue about, but pretty sure not what I need). Apologies in advance if this is a dumb question... the vista manual is not very thorough.

thanks!
K

[latindane]

Hello, and thanks for replying again. I'll definitely try google earth tonight see how that works; the trackback is definitely very easy to navigate with.

Here's what happens when I do routes: I pick the route and I'm given two choices: Navigate or Map.

Navigate sends me to the next major highway which has nothing to do with the actual route (thus my city navigator comment), so that's useless.

Map maps the start of the route, but as I start moving the caret moves along and outside of my map; I'd have to keep moving the little arrow around to center it right, and can't realistically do that on a bike. But maybe there's something that I should be doing that I'm not?

[latindane]

Cool stuff... I couldn't get a route from google earth (particularly, I couldn't get my route rather than what google earth deems as fastest/shortest. On top of that, I could only save to .kmz from google earth, which was not read by the converter (of course, this is the first time I use google earth, so I most likely missed something. But I found this post about how to do it directly from google maps, where it's very easy to customize a route: http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2007/06/google_maps_click_an.html#more

1.   Get your driving directions the way you want in Google Maps
   2. Click on the "Link to this page" in the upper right of Google Maps. You should get a little window with a long URL.
   3. Click the URL with the mouse and move the cursor to the right end (you should see something like "&z=11" at the end - which is the zoom level).
   4. Simply append "&output=kml" to the end of the URL
   5. Select the entire URL and copy it to your paste buffer (CTRL-C for example)
   6. Then paste it into your browser's location URL pane at the top (or you can click and drag the selected link to the location pane). Then hit ENTER. This should load up the directions in Google Earth! You won't be able to click and drag to change the directions, but you can view them in 3D.
   7. Once its loaded in Google Earth, hit the "Play" button below the Places pane - or select the "Tools->Play Tour" menu option. This will give you a cool flying 3D tour of the driving directions.

Note that google earth is redundant for my initial objective, but the "tour" is MUCH better than the streetview of the necessary turns in terms of visualizing the route.

Thanks for the help!

[alpine]

Another resource you might want to try is TopoFusion. Google Earth is mostly satellite imagery.

TopoFusion combines Sat., Topo and other maps to seamlessly move between them, and will export a gbx file. They have three levels of use. Free, Basic, and Pro. And you can try before you buy.

Take a look at it, I found it better that Google Earth. I make routes for ATV riding. Some trails show up on Sat, others show up on topo. Combine the two and it helps a lot.

[latindane]

Great stuff guys! I need to sink my teeth into google earth and try topofusion... will do 

[latindane]

It's actually pretty good. Today I followed road signs instead of trusting my trackback and it was useless. Wish I had trusted the little GPS more. I tried using proximity alerts once, and I think that will be very useful (esp. since, using google maps, each turn is a waypoint). Now I'm trying to figure out how to get an elevation profile from logged tracks, but will keep poking around and trying stuff.

Edit: got the elevation profile; in track properties  

[latindane]

Maybe you'll find the elevation profiles fun... these are from a trip over the sierra last weekend. Up Ebbett's pass/monitor pass, roundtrip in Yosemite, and back through Sonora pass. I posted the profiles here: http://bayarearidersforum.com/forums/showpost.php?p=5323227&postcount=620.