[fjmartin]

I'm hoping that the unit will be protected based on the waterproofing I did but we'll see how it does with vibration. Do you know what component failed due to vibration? Screen, motherboard, USB interface, buttons? If the motherboard or USB port I could possibly do something to solve that but I'd have to worry about heat build-up.

In my initial post, topic 8 was what I still needed to figure out. How to use the unit for non-road routes and how to have it track me and how to access that data. Well, I've blown a number of hours and have these two issues solved. On the off-road routing I had to do a bunch of experimentation and found that there are a couple of different types of points in a route. ViaPoints and ShapingPoints. ViaPoints are very much like a waypoint but strung together in a route. Between the ViaPoints are ShapingPoints. These are simply a bunch of dots to help shape the route to follow what you had drawn out. Now, on the Nuvi I have it can have up to 232 ShapingPoints and 29 ViaPoints. But I discovered a trick that allows you to put strings of these together to allow a much larger number of points. Think of a starting ViaPoint followed by a hundred ShapingPoints that connect to the next ViaPoint...repeat this over and over. But the memory is limited in my Nuvi so I found that the total number of points I should run in a route are 800. Anymore and it might crash the unit. The good news is that 800 points are a LOT. Enough for a solid day of riding. This just means a multi-day trip will have multiple route files. I kind of like that. Next though was how can I take the track files that get generated by many of the tools I use like RideWithGPS and convert them to a route that works on the Nuvi. Well, since I have a background in programming I decided to use PowerShell to take the source track file which may have thousands and thousands of points, shape it down to 800 points and then evenly place ViaPoints in the file to keep from hitting the maximums. The program then generates a well formed XML document in GPX Route format that works perfectly on the Nuvi. The script also generates another GPX file but this one contains a Waypoint to the start of the route. This is nice as many times you ride the road to get to the start of a dirt trail and by selecting the waypoint the Nuvi will use auto road routing to get you there and then you select the dirt route to have your offroad fun. It works perfectly for me and I have a buddy testing it also to make sure I haven't missed anything.

On the topic of getting tracking info from a ride, I found that if you turn on the follow me feature and then plug in the Garmin into the PC and open BaseCamp you will see the tracks by date/time. You can export these and if you run them through my script they will create a route file you can use later.

So I'm all geeked out for the moment. Yes, I'm a nerd!

Looking forward to the Touratech rally in a few weeks and then I leave with a buddy on July 2nd to head up to Hyder, AK, the Yukon Territory and then down through British Columbia. 10 days.