Mystery tracks have appeared in my BMW Navigator V

Former Member over 5 years ago

I bought my BMW motorcycle in September of 2016. It was new, with a new BMW Navigator V GPS (which is a Garmin).

I don't remember exactly when this happened, but sometime in the past 6-12 months or so, a bunch of mystery track info has shown up on my GPS. I usually download all my track data once a year and then wipe everything from the device. On this occasion, there were a bunch of tracks from 2015, and one from 2000. They were not there before. A lot of the data looks very much like someone commuting back and forth between two points. There's even a "Home" waypoint in Kanata, Ontario. I don't live in Kanata! (doubly odd ... the "Home" waypoint for my actual location is in the right place, but under "Contact Info" has the address of a Petro-Can gas station in Casselman, Ontario, which is a frequent waypoint in the tracks of this mystery data.

They are not just corrupted tracks of my own ... they describe routes that I have never ridden.

I also cannot delete them from the GPS. If I delete everything from my GPS, all history, saved waypoints, everything, and then reconnect the GPS to my laptop, there's the bogus route data again. In fact, there's track data and waypoints of my own that I can't delete either. I just finished wiping everything from my device and there's still old tracks and waypoints visible from within Basecamp:

None of this is stopping me from using the device.

0 Former Member over 5 years ago

Like any decent IT guy I figured, just factory reset the thing.

Which I did.

And yet when starting it up it told me it had found new routes and "do I want to import them?" Saying "yes", it turns out they were the last batch of routes that I had uploaded 2 - 3 weeks ago. Maybe uploaded routes are stored in nvram? Maybe other data is somehow getting stored in nvram?

Regardless, doing a factory reset has changed nothing. Still have the mystery tracks form 2000/2015/2016, plus previous tracks of my own from 2019 and 2020.

I'm at a loss.

0 Former Member over 5 years ago

An absolute Saga:

I manually started deleting stuff that look relevant from the internal memory via Finder (I'm on a Mac). The mystery tracks no longer show up when I browse the device via Basecamp. But they now do show up in the track list on the device! Previously they would not show up in the device tracklist, only in Basecamp. This time I was able to delete the offending mystery track data from the device itself.

Two hangovers:

1. My "Home" address on the device was set to this place in Kanata from the mystery tracks,

2. A way point for the Petro-Can I mentioned above from the mystery tracks.

I deleted them from the device.

All that is left is a single anonymous waypoint (default blue flag waypoint named "001") that is the address of my actual residence.

I suspect this is a ploy by BMW to get me to buy the NAV VI.