Maximum Via and shaping points in a route for XT2

[abowen500]

Hello,

I've previously found these references and am trying to verify they are the still accurate for the XT2.

From Garmin - https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=7 ... w1svGjJlb6
"Your device has the Trip Planner or Route Planner tool or app and has an amount limit of 30 waypoints per route. "
Follow up question, this is referring to maximum Via Points aka a point that must be traveled through or manually skipped while navigating, and does not refer to shaping points?

And from elsewhere on these forums from a knowledgeable person - viewtopic.php?t=2466&hilit=maximum+via+points&start=10
"There is a limit in the XT of 125 shaping points between Via Points."

Thanks.

-Alan

[jfheath]

I think that this is may be an error. Some member of staff recruited from another route planner company who do not know the definitions perhaps ?
I have just posted a comment to Garmin about it in the feedback box.

It is easy enough to check. Make a route of more than 30 waypoints and make all of them shaping points except start and finish. I feel pretty sure that the XT2 will accept it.

I'll report back.

nb - put in Zumo XT2, and the page reports that it doesn't apply to the XT2 - but the limit of 30 (actually 31 including start and finish) Via points per route applies to all Zumos with the trip planner app that I have used - 590, 595 and XT

I think that Kurviger users would have spotted this. Kurviger sends all via and shaping points to the Zumo as Waypoints, and saves them in the 'Favourites' , 'Saved' or 'Waypoint' app on the Zumo. So that would limit all routes from Kurviger to 30 route points. Someone on here would have noticed.

The second link you posted was one of mine. Thanks for that - since I wrote it, Ive had chance to look at Kurviger using a fellow members subscription for a day. I've corrected the detail about Kurviger in that post.

[jfheath]

OK - I cannot answer the question about the Maximum numbers for the XT2. It is way more than I would ever want to know.

But clarification on the number of waypoints. The statement that is (was) on the website is definitely wrong.

I used Basecamp's POIs to search for hotels in and around Bradford, and kept re-searching until it got above 50.
I selected each one of the first 46 discovered hotels and right click on the name and created a waypoint from it - so I had 46 waypoints saved in Basecamp.
I then selected all of the Waypoints and got BAsecamp to create a route from them.
(Then asked it to optimize the route. Click the image to see a better quality version.)

46 Hotel Route BC Screenshot.png (496.89 KiB) Viewed 911 times

At this point the route is a straight line (Direct) route. This is only becasue the route that follows roads rather clutters up the display.
The routes were recalculated using 2025.1 Europe maps

I created two copies of this route - both of which are attached.

One I called 46 Waypoints All Vias
The other copy I modified so that only the first, last and the Lister Hotel were set as Via Points. The others were all set as Shaping Points.

Why the Lister Hotel ?
Once optimised, the Lister Hotel was the 31st point in the route. The XT splits any route with more than 31 Via Points into two parts - which meant that the Lister Hotel would be the last hotel of the 1st part and the 1st hotel of the second part. The hotel is used in both routes (which is why the figure of 30 Via points is often quoted)

So then I placed the GPX files onto the memory card of the XT and the XT2 and asked them both to import.

This took a long time. I reckon about 15 minutes for both routes before the XT and XT2 came back from their import duties.

The XT and XT2 behaved very differently.

The Zumo XT

A message came onto the screen - Importing 1 of 2 and a percentage countdown timer.
The first route took about 10 minutes (I didn't time it ). Explore was enabled on the XT - so it may have been synchronising Waypoints
The second route took considerably less time - it had the same waypoints, so it didn't have to store them again. I timed that at 3 minutes.

The Zumo XT displayed a message:

46 Waypoints All Vias has more than 29 Via Points. Route was split into two trips.

Yes. Trip Planner had two routes:

• one called "46 Waypoints All Vias 1" with 31 Via Points, ending with The Lister Hotel
• one called "46 Waypoints All Vias 2" with 16 Via Points, starting with The Lister Hotel.

In Trip Planner - the two disjointed Via Point routes showed all of the orange flags - 29 in one,14 in the other. Both also had the start and finsih markers. The other route has mainly blue disc shaping point markers and 3 flags. These are seen in the list view of the trip and on the maps.

I checked the Waypoints. (In 'Favourites' on the UK Zumo XT. They will be in 'Saved' on a USA XT).
They were not there. Waypoints are not imported automatically when the GPX is placed on the SD Card.
This is a glitch in the XT software, which I reported to them 3 years ago, and remain unfixed for the XT.
So you need a waypoint saved in internal memory: Tap the map to get a flag and save that, and as if by magic, all 46 waypoints then become available to import.

I sometimes wonder if I get a little synical about the ability of some of Garmin's programmers. It is complicated software after all. Then I see it do something like this and I wonder if they let the work experience kids onto it unsupervised.

The second route with 3 Via points imported perfectly OK. So it too had 46 Waypoints, but only 3 Via points. The rest of the waypoints ahd been set as shaping points.
In the trip planner app the three Via were marked with flags - green, orange and chequered, and all of the rest were shaping points.
Second copies of the Waypoints were not imported - even though they were all declared in both files.
If I had put the routes into internal storage/gpx, the waypoints would have been imported to the Zumo XT on transfer.


The Zumo XT2

The processing took a little longer than the XT - but there wasn't much in it. The link with the Explore database has not yet been set up - so there was no chance that it was synchronising. Both routes were present without any warning message, and indeed - the 46 Waypoints All Vias had imported as one route. So the Via Point restriction of 31 doesn't apply to the XT2 - although why you would want a route with that many Via Points, is beyond me. But it suggests that Garmin have a need for that. I have thoughts on that, but not for this thread.

No issues with importing the Waypoints. The XT2 calls them 'Waypoints' at long last. Not Favourites or Saved.
They are used in the route and for one route all 46 waypoints have been imported and all 46 are used as Via Points - if we count the start and finish as Via Points - because they are.
The other (mainly shaping point) route is also imported correctly with all route points shown on the map and in the list view.

On import, the XT2 asks which collection you want to import to, or you can have them go into unorganised, or you can create a collection just for these routes, waypoints and tracks. Not that we had any tracks in these gpx files.

My advice (although I reserve the right to change my mind when I start to know what I am talking about) - is that you should import everything into a bran new collection (which you can create during the import process). That way you can turn off all other collections and have the XT2 looking as though there is nothing else there. It becomes much easier to organise if you have everything to do with one route in its own collection. Later you can split off the stuff for individual days - keep the full collection name - just have some of the data also in Monday's collection, some in Tuesday's - etc

I have just noticed the time difference of 44 minutes between the two routes. Is that an extra minute added on for each Via Point ??

Side by Side Routes.png (1.4 MiB) Viewed 911 times

[biglew55]

I think the XT2 plays by differnt rules in regards to route limitations. From the device document:

• </CustomExtension>
  <LimitExtension xmlns="http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/Garmin ... /Limits/v1">
  <MaxRoutes>2147483647</MaxRoutes>
  <MaxRoutePts>32768</MaxRoutePts>
  <MaxShapingPtsBetweenVias>998</MaxShapingPtsBetweenVias>
  <MaxRouteName>36</MaxRouteName>
  <MaxSysRtePts>2147483647</MaxSysRtePts>
  <MaxWaypoints>10000</MaxWaypoints>
  <MaxWptName>120</MaxWptName>
  <WptNameUnique>1</WptNameUnique>
  <MaxTracks>2000</MaxTracks>
  <MaxTrackPts>100000</MaxTrackPts>
  <MaxTrackName>36</MaxTrackName>
  <MaxMapTilesPerFile>400</MaxMapTilesPerFile>
  <MaxImgFileMbSize>3</MaxImgFileMbSize>
  <MaxJnxFiles>1000</MaxJnxFiles>
  <MaxJnxTiles>5000</MaxJnxTiles>
  </LimitExtension>

I don't have my old units handy for comparison.

[abowen500]

Thanks for the detailed answers @jfheath and @biglew55. It seems like the limits are much higher for the XT2 which, in my opinion, gives us more flexibility. For example, the Blue Ridge Parkway is about 486 miles long and I may want to put a via point every 5 miles or so. Or, if I choose to use fewer than 31 via points, even the previous limit of 125 shaping points between vias would suffice for this.

For the time being, though, until older navigation units age out, it's probably best to plan routes using the previous limits.