GPSrChive Discussion Forum

Hi!
I recently came across this problem using my GPSMap on a bike ride in darkness:
When navigating a track at night you can easily miss turns when the display isn't permanently illuminated in order to check the route without touching the device. Since track navigation does not have any turning alerts which light up the display navigating tracks with a lot of turns is pretty annoying.Yes, we now have the off-track-alert but when it triggers it is already too late, the track is already left.
So is there are solution to navigate a track at night/in darkness without having the display illuminated the whole time and without getting lost at every turn? I tried converting the track to a course but route calculation is painfully slow and when leaving the course (maybe because of a deviation) it starts to calculating its own routing based on the shortest way and the course is dismissed.

You may want to start by configuring 'Setup > Routing > Course Navigation' for 'Direct Path'. This should result in "No map adjustments, No recalculations, Follows course exactly as pinned". I suspect you currently have this setting configured for 'Roads and Trails'.

Also make sure 'Course Alerts' are enabled.

Yes, Course Alerts are enabled. But they trigger only when I've left the track and that is too late.
I tried navigating using "Direct Path" but then it is like a normal track navigation, without notification or am I missing something?

Are you navigating the track or the course?

I tried both.
The track doesn't give any notifications at all and the course only when choosing "Road and Trails". But here calculating takes a lot of time and no routing back to the original route really exists.
"Direct Path" behaves like a track navigation, at least here.

Please try saving the course as a Route and then navigate that route.

Oh yes - a route is what I've searched for.
I converted the track on the device to a course and then to a route (no idea why it is not possible to do it directly).
After the calculations were done it navigated the former track with turning notifications. And recalculating a course back to the route when it is left works, too.
The only negative thing is, that the route calculation takes ages. I had a route of approx. 20km and it took more than 5 minutes to do pre-calculate the routing. Is there any way to speed this up?