GPS Information Session

As many of you may know we held our first GPS information system on February 21 and it seemed to go over fairly well. Six people attended and shoe-horned into my den where I had a 40" flat screen TV as a monitor.

If you were still wondering what it is a about, this is primarily aimed at back-road or off-road riders. Anyone can use a street GPS to navigate with a routable map. Simply key in an address and voila, turn-by-turn directions.

However, it's quite a bit different when you are planning your ride over forest service roads or trails. Over the past few years I've learned a few techniques for planning routes for back road adventures that have turned out pretty well. I prefer to use an outdoor GPS because of their versatility for hiking and ability to record and store tracks. I have been using a Garmin Oregon and have recently purchase a Garmin Montana. The techniques I'm using would adapt to just about any outdoor GPS.

Click the links below to check out a couple of rides that have resulted.

2014 Bella Coola - Chilcotin Country
2012 Idaho, Oregon and the Stanley Stomp

My techniques involve the liberal use of paper maps, MapSource and BaseCamp software, Google Earth and occasionally an outjie board. :silly:

At any rate we are planning to hold at least three more sessions.

• Thursday, March 26th at 7:00 PM at my home in Kelowna
• Saturday, March 28th at 2:00 PM , also at my home.
• Mid to Late April in Kamloops. Location at date to be confirmed.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them on this forum so others can see them, but also pop me a quick email so I'll know to check here. (dwcorley@shaw.ca)

If you are interested in attending let me know as I am a bit limited for space in my den unless I can get my netbook computer working properly. (long story) First come, first served.

Regards, Wayne

A quick update on our GPS information sharing sessions.

We have completed 3 sessions so far (about 2 hours each), have had 11 members participate and the feedback has been pretty good. While I have put together a number of topics to cover, based on participant expectations and questions, the discussions have been informal and free-form.

The topics discussed included:

Outdoor GPS versus Automotive GPS
• Tracking
• Altitude
• Routing Options
• Compass

Profiles
• What are they
• Changing Profiles
• Custom Profiles

Maps
• Street Maps versus Topographical maps
• Locked or Unlocked Maps
• Downloaded maps onto computer
• Selecting custom map areas to send to GPS
• Memory restrictions on GPS

Waypoints
• Saving on the GPS
• Creating on the computer in MapSource
• Transferring waypoints to the GPS
• Wireless transfer between GPS units

Routing
• Creating a route in MapSource
• Point-to-point or Direct Routing versus Auto-Routing
• Transferring the route to the GPS
• Following the route on the GPS

Tracks
• Creating and saving tracks on the GPS
• Transferring and saving tracks to the PC
• Modifying or Filtering tracks

Our next planned session will be in the Kamloops area as we have a number of people in that neck of the woods who have expressed interest. Ted Moore has generously offered his place as a meeting point and the tentative date is Saturday, May 2nd.

I'll be posting more information on here in a week or so and will also directly email those who are interested. In the meantime if you have any questions on the session, reply to this post and I'll try to get you an answer.

Cheers, Wayne