XT all over the place in Belgium, Luxembourg and France

[jfheath]

I've got a few possibilities here.

Check your track logs. Load them into Basecamp. See if there are any gaps in them. You would expect a continuous line, but I've been noticing gaps - usually when the satnav is recalculating.

Also see if there are any spikes in the speed profile - which might indictae that it had 'lost' you and then you suddenly cover half a mile in 2 seconds.

I had a look on Google maps and street view. Garmin have been working on 'intelligent' instructions. They have a name for it, and I cannot remember what it is. 'Real' Navigation or something like that. 'Intelligent' is my rather generous substitute rather than being bothered to go and find out its proper name. Anyway - instead of saying turn left into High Street - which is not always very helpful, becasue usually you don't know the name of the street until you have either turned into it, or are right on top of it. So the satnav sometimes says turn left at the third set of traffic lights. Or turn right at the Church.
I'm wondering if it had said trun left at Emery Wharf - which is the only thing that I can find on Google Maps that may sound like Edward. (Like it startes with a letter E). Yes. I know. Clutching at straws.

I've been doing some testing. My XT would repetedly ask for U turns if I went off route on a route that it had calculated. It seems that it would get stuck in a cycle of asking for a U turn - becasue that was the faster route and I would ignore it - knowing that my route is actually shorter, faster and a much nicer ride. After a mile it should recognise that my way is better. Certainly if I stopped and start the route from that location, the XT would calculate my route. Not the one it was taking me back to. But what it seems to do is to calculate a route back to to the closest point - which is the one just behaind me that it calculated a few minutes earlier. Each Recalculation caused a break in the track.

However. Something recently - the last three weeks - has changed that behaviour. I did some tests on Friday on a route where this fault has cropped up a few times before, and which I had recorded evidence of track logs, XT screen shots etc, and have submitted to Garmin. And it is now behaving differently. More or less as it should do - calculating a route to the next route point.

Except - except when I chose closest entry point for my start point. Then it did what I described above, forever trying to tak me back tot he point at which I deviated from the original route.

In those three weeks I have at various times:
Disabled Explore.
Performed a full system reset.
Used Express to perform various ssmall file updates. One of which mentioned software, but the software is still version 6.50.

Later today, I will be reporting the results back to the Technical support person that has been assigned to my case - which was specifically to do with the broken track - but she was very interested in the repeated U turns (which I had also reported previously).

I wonder if any of this rings any bells.

John (not Jeff, although my sig looks like it)

[Wapping123]

My apologies, John (not Jeff).

In my rush to return what I think is a faulty XT device to Amazon, I now realise that I restored its factory settings, which of course wiped the track records. Without a doubt, my XT was unable to achieve a reliable and stable lock onto satellites, through the late afternoon of Friday, all of Saturday and through most of Sunday. This was running bespoke routes, created in MyRoute. The device did though behave normally again, when I asked it for a simple route A to B, Chunnel exit UK to London. That might all be coincidental. I am at a total loss why it kept losing its satellite lock in Belgium, Luxembourg and France. You might expect a very occasional loss of satellite lock in the very deep valleys of the Ardennes, made worse perhaps by very cloudy, rain filled skies, but it was happening regularly, including on simple dual carriageway roads across very open countryside. The drop off was really frequent.

When I get a chance, I’ll test my new XT to see:

A. If it misbehaves in Luxembourg again, using exactly the same routes.

B. Repeats the same instruction, whereby it amends the regular ‘Turn left to Vaughan Way’ with ‘Turn left to Edward’ or whatever it was the device said to do.