Zumo User Forums

A little back ground. This is my first year with a zumo. I have yet to have any issue at all till now. I just completed the latest up grade just a couple of weeks ago. I make my routes in base camp, then down load them directly onto zumo. both settings are set to fastest time.

When I load my route into zumo, the milage and some times times are off. Last week the milage in bc said 419, but on zumo it was something in the600 miles. We loaded the map into my friends goldwing nav and that went fine. He led the trip and about halfway through the milage was perfect on my zumo compare to his nav. I rode in the back and used zumo and all was fine. matched every road except 1. But that led back to where we eventually went
This week I made 2 routes for tomorrows ride. 1being 106 miles, the other 144. When I load it into zumo they are showing 181 miles and 236. I looked at the maps in zumo and they are not following my shaping points. they would stop mid rout and make a u turn to take me down another route in the opposite direction thus causing the increase in milage. Any idea on whats going on?

Apply more shaping points to make the route stick to your plan. The XT seems (to me) to sometimes require more points than previous models.

I did add more shaping points. What was happening was it made me complete a u turn to go to another direction onto a road I did not plan.I simply made uturn an avoidance and everything is perfect.

I figured out what was happening with last weeks ride also. I remembered that there was a road that we went on that was a dirt road. I had dirt road avoidance on. I made all points shaping except one. that was a point that we definatly wanted to see. I didn't realize that it was on a dirt road. I turned off dirt road avoidance and it just worked.

This XT is the least intuitive of the 3 models of Garmin that I've used. The routing decisions sometimes make no sense whatsoever. The last "issue" I came across:

I'm putzing down a highway, 2 lane NC country road. I live on this road, about 80 miles away. I touch Where To? and Go Home. Instead of just riding down the road I'm on for 80 miles this thing wants me to go 120 miles to get home. Makes no sense at all. Didn't matter if I picked Faster or Shorter, it wanted me to go 120 miles instead of 80. I started at my destination end and added points. It took 6 additional points to force this thing to go straight on a road that's both shorter and faster than what it wanted to do.

I don't have confidence in the avoidances either. Too many times I've found myself on an unpaved road.

I have experienced everything @rbentnail has mentioned. One other thing to watch out for is routes created in Basecamp that won't calculate on the XT. My last trip included six daily routes. I had transferred them to the SD card on the XT before leaving. Each morning I would import that days trip and start off. On day four, I imported the route and the XT reported "Cannot calculate the route". I had satellite connection so I deleted the route and imported it again. Same problem. Fortunateley I was traveling with my laptop and had not returned the motel room key so I went back to the room with my laptop and recreated the route from scratch using the original as a guide but creating all new waypoints except for coffee stop, fuel stops, lunch stop, and destination. The XT calculated that route. I will now test every route sent to the XT before using it (what a PITA to have to do).

FWIW, I don't use shaping points. I have had more problems with routes that contained shaping points than ones that didn't so I place via points on the road and ride through them instead of using shaping points. I ride with spoken navigation turned off most of the time.

A new experience for me was a fuel stop where the pumps were far enough away from the main building that the XT didn't detect that I had visited that point. I was down the road aways before noticing it so instructed the XT to skip it. The resulting recalc munged the remainder of the route requiring me to stop and reload the route. The recalc of the entire remaining route after skipping a point is one of my biggest issues with the XT. An option to mark a point as visited would be nice when that point is behind you.

Peobody wrote: ↑Sun Oct 02, 2022 1:08 pm An option to mark a point as visited would be nice when that point is behind you.

But shaping points will do that automatically as long as you are on the plotted route and haven't by-passed any Via Points.

There's certainly an added dimension to how Vias and Shaping points are treated. Not yet sure what it is.

I know in some circumstances if you bypass a shaping point and rejoin the route, it is happy to navigate you ahead, but the point isn't removed from its 'skip list' - but I had vias involved when I found this out.

Back to the OP. Go through your avoidances and preferences and remove anything you dont want. Non of the settings from Basecamp are sent to the Zumo apart from faster/slower and motorcycle/car. If it doesn't get one of these, it defaults to motorcycle and to faster time.

Note that the Zumo keeps a different group of settings for car and for motorcycle.

jfheath wrote: ↑Sun Oct 02, 2022 4:38 pm

Peobody wrote: ↑Sun Oct 02, 2022 1:08 pm An option to mark a point as visited would be nice when that point is behind you.

But shaping points will do that automatically as long as you are on the plotted route and haven't by-passed any Via Points.

Correct. My comment only applies to visited Vias that the XT didn't acknowledge as visited. This is off topic though.