After reading this thread I decided to get my Zumo 550 out and give it a try,after seeing all of the problems you are having..Because I myself have never had any trouble..First I updated all of the current stuff and now it will not transfer ****..what did you guys do to me? LOL..Never had a problem till I read this thread..It tells me to contact customer service..

 

There is a pretty good Mapsource tutorial out on the Zumo forum, look in the how to guides.

I pretty much gave up on it myself and just use the HD ride planner. One thing I really like about it is the ability to share the ride plan with others. It's really useful for group rides, you can publish the ride plan and once everyone agrees, download it to your GPS.

I had a bit of trouble with the HD Ride Planner and Internet Explorer, but once I switched to Firefox all is well.

 

Dammit! All this time I have been using paper maps & figuring out my ride! Only problem I have with them is the wife can't fold the damn things right.

Nice thing about paper is you decide the route, you write it down, make decisions along the way. Haven't had a software glitch in years. But that's just me.

 

Which is fine if you know where you are. But I tend to go places without paying a lot of attention to how I got there. It's nice to hit that "home" button at the end of the day and not have to worry about ending up at Pismo Beach instead of Albuquerque.

And so's not to be off topic, I'll vote for Mapsource being a PITA, too. I've never had major problems with using it, though.

 

+1 for Mapsource being a PITA.

I have a StreetPilot 2720 and I like to take my breadcrumb trail and make routes out of it. Major pain unlocking maps, zooming, tracing and drawing routes.

Ugh.

Going to try Tyre and see how it works with the 2720.

Also the HD Planner. My Road King is about 3 hours away from being a week old, so I didn't even know it existed.

Also for anybody concerned I will be running Tyre from Windoze 7 through VMware Fusion on a Mac.

Reports to follow.

 

I've used the HD ride planner and when I download it to my Garmin 755 instead of one route I get one route for each set of waypoints. Only way I can make it work is design the rounte and then eliminate all the waypoints except the start and fishinsh one. Mapquest is okay, at least it transfers the entire set of waypoints into one route. Crazy thing about Mapquest is I make it plot the exact roads I want to travel and sometimes the road is off to one side by maybe 1/2 mile. Once it had the route traveling down the middle of a river instead of on the road beside the river.

 

I had those problems also and ended up using TYRE as a user suggested earlier in the thread. Solved a lot of the crap I had going on. You can save a route in tomtom format (which I have) or Garmin. The only suggestion I have about using it is make sure to zoom down to street level before setting a waypoint, otherwise you might be putting the waypoint on a side street and miss it. TYRE puts the waypoint markers in the middle of the road marks them 'visited' if you go within a 100 yards of them.

I tries 3 or 4 others before I settled in TYRE. BTW, it's free.

 

I've used MapSource and transferred the routes to my Zumo 550 many times for touring. I learned how to use it on the Zumo Forum and I guess I just adapted to it without trying other programs. I think it's a pretty slick program. My only gripe is that it displays routes as local road names instead of (f'rinstance) US route 30.

I use the routing tool and select intersections for waypoints. Intersections are "invisible waypoints" and don't show up as flags and they aren't announced as waypoints on the Zumo.

Maybe I'll try the HD Planner you guys are talking about and see what I've been missing. Is it free? I'm not sure I can figure out how to load an HD Planner route on the GPS.

 

Thanks for the info on the HD Ride Planner. I never knew it existed. Mapping with the Zumo 660 is straight forward, but a little slow. It would be nice to design a route online and just load it up.

 

I hadn't tried it either until a few days ago, and I think I'm going to start using it instead of Mapsource. I plotted a few routes and it seemed straightforward enough, then transferred them to my Zumo 450 intact without any glitches. I didn't notice any slowness using this desktop, but I haven't tried it on my netbook yet.

This solves one major problem for me on trips. Mapsource is a bitch to install on my netbook computer that I use on trips, as it is very short on storage space. I can now use the HD planner on-line while on the road without requiring any storage overhead.