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Living with a Garmin:

The Follow Road Trap

Does your Etrex Legend or Vista seem to be limited to 50 points maximum, per Route?
If so, you have fallen into the Follow Road Trap.

In the Settings menu, under Routing, the top entry is a choice of Prompted, Follow Road or Off Road.
As a road user, the Follow Road option would seem to be the obvious one to choose, right?
Well, no - and the factory default is Off Road, which resets itself to Prompted when you first install a routable map (such as City) into the GPS.
If you've never altered these settings, you'll probably find it set to Prompted, which is the best choice.

The problem is that in Follow Road mode the GPS is restricted to routes of 50 points or fewer. Any more and it will display this message when you attempt to follow the route, and in fact it won't even use it in truncated form.
With the Guidance Method set to Follow Road, this is all that happens - error message, FAIL.
However in Off Road mode (which is Garmin-speak for direct, point-to-point route following) the GPS can actually handle up to 250 points per Route.
You might as well at least have the choice - so the best way to set it up is to do this:

Now, whenever you select a Route, you will be given this option. If you choose Follow Road and the route turns out to have too many points, it simply returns to this option box so you can choose the other one, which will load OK. The apparent 50-point limit has gone!
(NB - don't tick that 'Don't ask again' box - that would simply drop you back into the same old trap again!
Yes, it's an extra click-through every time you load a Route - but it's a small price to pay for the extra functionality you get.)

Francis Cooke


	In the Settings menu, under Routing, the top entry is a choice of Prompted, Follow Road or Off Road. As a road user, the Follow Road option would seem to be the obvious one to choose, right? Well, no - and the factory default is Off Road, which resets itself to Prompted when you first install a routable map (such as City) into the GPS. If you've never altered these settings, you'll probably find it set to Prompted, which is the best choice.
	The problem is that in Follow Road mode the GPS is restricted to routes of 50 points or fewer. Any more and it will display this message when you attempt to follow the route, and in fact it won't even use it in truncated form. With the Guidance Method set to Follow Road, this is all that happens - error message, FAIL. However in Off Road mode (which is Garmin-speak for direct, point-to-point route following) the GPS can actually handle up to 250 points per Route. You might as well at least have the choice - so the best way to set it up is to do this:

	Now, whenever you select a Route, you will be given this option. If you choose Follow Road and the route turns out to have too many points, it simply returns to this option box so you can choose the other one, which will load OK. The apparent 50-point limit has gone! (NB - don't tick that 'Don't ask again' box - that would simply drop you back into the same old trap again! Yes, it's an extra click-through every time you load a Route - but it's a small price to pay for the extra functionality you get.)