david 1701

I do know the GPS will only hold X amount of routes, mine holds 10. This info is somewhere buried in the specs of the GPS. I had a long route and it devided it into 5 sections. it was a pain

 

My 550 holds 50, & the 660/665 hold 20 routes unless you have a micro SD card for extra memory. Easy to find on Garmin's web site under "specs".

The map programs are getting bigger & eat more memory so that may reduce storage places for routes, but an SD card might help.

 

I added an 8GB card and between audio books and music, filled it fast. I upgraded it to the max capable 16GB to give me some breathing room. The extra space is nice, but it takes the 660 up to 30 seconds to index the files when I boot up. Until this happens, it looks as if you have no tunes. It also takes a few seconds for newly-added routes to appear. The waiting isn't an issue, but it had me wondering until I figured out what was happening. Once everything is up and running, it runs smooth and fast.

 

When you have a route.gpx file on the card how do you get the route to show on the gps? Is there a menu item in tools that does this? Thanks in advance

 

Mine appear in the Custom Routes list. I press "Where To", scroll down to and select "Custom Routes" and they're there in their alphabetical ordered list. (had to go for the 3rd "their" variation...extra points)

 

Another not sure if this will help but: I've had the 550 since it came out. It does not have a ton of memory it won't even hold the entire country as a map. I've loaded New England (where I'm from) into the Zumo and the rest of the country onto the 8Gig card. I've also ripped 20 albums or so of music onto the 8gig card. When I travel past my New England area, the Zumo picks up from the card. It just works. As to the Harley Ride planner, I love using it to first plan my routes. I also plan them by day1, day2 etc... Then I upload them to the zumo and if I upload them again they do get named with a 2, or a 3 etc... I like this though, I delete the ones I don't want from the zumo. Once I have them on the zumo I can tweak them if I want with MapSource. The nice thing about the ride planner is that I can share the ride with the group I'm traveling with and they can see it in the ride planner. They can't do that if I'm only using Mapsource. Although I recently learned the Google Earth will let you upload a route to it, and there are boxes to display waypoints or not. You can then email friends the route file and they can load it into Google Earth.

Joe

 

I'd spend some time with it well in advance of your trip - there is a learning curve to creating routes and exporting them and so on.

It is very easy and just like any other GPS to find a destination and hit GO but if you want to customize routes it takes some time to learn. That was my experience anyway.

 

You definitely want to spend some time playing with a new GPS to get used to it - out on the road is not a good place to get familiar with it.

Same thing with Mapsource. It has gotten better, but it's not as intuitive as it could be especially if you're making custom routes rather than letting the software do the routing.

 

I have the 660 and off course never read the manual, I think the +1,+2, etc. Are the waypoints of the trip. When I did the trip planner, and imported the file, each section was imported, like a folder with the different files.

 

Joe, my 550 holds the entire country using Mapsource's 2011 map set. I don't have any music loaded, & only 1 picture for the splash screen, but the base unit holds the entire country. I do agree though on the memory, all the Garmin units are going to have to increase memory, or condense the map sets.