Garmin Adventures

Former Member over 13 years ago

Any scheduled maintenance on the Garmin Adventure servers will occur Tuedays at 7:45am CT. Most maintenance down times will be less than 20 min. If you are experiencing an issue with adventures during this time, please try again later.

More on adventures here: adventures.garmin.com

New firmware with adventure support has been released for:

Montana
62 Series (includes 78 series)
Oregon x50 Series
Dakota

“Garmin Adventures” is a new feature that allows you to easily share trips and photos and lets you find Adventures by other Garmin users. You can download a track from your GPS to BaseCamp, add some photos, videos and annotations; upload the trip as an Adventure and then share it via the Garmin Adventures web site with friends and family. BaseCamp allows you to author Adventures, and use a playback feature so you can re-live your trip. In the near future, Garmin devices will add support for Adventures as well.

The BaseCamp 4.0.0.4 gives you an early preview into Garmin Adventures. Please let us know how you like it and what you think we can improve. BaseCamp 4.0.0.4 will lead you to short surveys that will help us make Adventures a better product. If you have a minute to spare, please fill out these surveys. Thanks.

Finding Adventures

You can use BaseCamp’s find feature to locate other Adventures. You can download Adventures that you would like to take a closer look at. If you'd like to follow an adventure, just transfer it to your device.

Adventure Display and Playback

You can view details about an Adventure, and use the Playback feature. The Playback experience will be better if you have a Topo map and BirdsEye imagery. Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8al8CHqOBmg for an example.

Creating an Adventure

You can create an Adventure from any track, either from My Collection or directly from your device. BaseCamp will locate photos and waypoints in the vicinity of the Adventure track. You can add annotations, YouTube videos and additional photos. It is important that you enter a good description so other can better experience your Adventure. Note that you can pick from the prepopulated list of activities or simply enter your own.

Each Adventure has its own database, so you can play around with your Adventure’s data without making any changes in your data in My Collection.

Publishing an Adventure

Once you are happy with your adventure, you can publish it. You can share a published adventure with friends and family (http://adventures.garmin.com/en-US/by/eracerz/hanakapiai-falls-trail-hike-2), you can link the adventure to your favorite social media site, you can use it to back-up your trip and download it again on a different machine and you can help fellow Adventurers find interesting stuff to do.

0 JOHNCNA over 12 years ago

Falagar, can you download this Adventure and report on what you see in BaseCamp?
http://adventures.garmin.com/en-US/by/johncna/afton-forest-preserve/

The status message said that some things would be simplified and converted, so I'm wondering what the end user will see when they download this. My questions would be:
1. Do you see 3 different colors of tracks; magenta, cyan and blue?
2. Do the geocache icons show as geocaches with the geocache name or just with a waypoint flag and GC code?
3. Do the Parking and Crossing icons show up as such, or with just a generic waypoint flag?
In the online view, none of the attributes show up as I described. I'm really curious if they show up the same way when they get downloaded into BaseCamp. I have verified that all of those things show up as designed if I send the adventure to my Etrex 30. It would be a shame if others who download our adventures do not get to take advantage of the same display.

I have a suggestion already. When the adventure is played/viewed on the device, only the main track is displayed on the device screen. We should either have the option to "show all" or manually select which tracks show on the device when it's downloaded. This extra level of detail would be very helpful and augment whatever topo map the users have.
Thanks

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

I uploaded a screenshot of what I see in BaseCamp.

So:

1. Yes.
2. I see cache symbols and the code (not the name).
3. Looks like it's the correct symbols.

Being able to show/use more than one track is something we've had requested a few times. We'll see what we can do. This is definitely more long-term though.

P.S. Really like that adventure. That's exactly the kind of thing we had in mind. That should be really useful for people wanting to do a little trip in the area.

0 JOHNCNA over 12 years ago

Awesome. Thanks! Except for the GC codes showing intead of the geocache names, your screen shot is exactly what I see in my BaseCamp.

And now you have a better understanding of why I have posted questions in the past about joining tracks that are not linear, etc. ;)

I tried another Adventure and only the main track showed up on my Etrex screen. I had to go into track manager and turn on "show on map" on all the additional added tracks. Very tedious. I suspect it will be the same here. It would be GREAT if BaseCamp could preserve the "show on map" attribute for tracks when they get downloaded to a device. BC already is preserving and transferring the track color information to the device.

There's a problem that might need to be fixed; the caches are showing as "Found" except the one that I could not find. I don't know if they will show up on the user's device after it's downloaded to his device. The default on the Etrex is to only show "Un-Found" caches. So if they are marked as found, a person who downloads this might only see the one single unfound cache on his screen. I'm not sure how I could verify that.

0 JOHNCNA over 12 years ago

So I cleared out the Etrex and sent the adventure from BC to the Etrex. It shows all the caches as found, but displays them all in the adventure contents and on the map. Good Deal. Reviewing them shows the description and hint but no logs. Guess that's not too bad, but the logs are there in BaseCamp and they're important to have when you're having a hard time finding something.

Do you think we'll ever get the option to have an adventure navigate to the waypoints/caches in the order in which they are arranged in the track and just have the track displayed for reference? That would actually fit the way a geocacher would use it. I tried running an adventure the other day and gave up before too long because when geocaching, I want the distance and arrow referring to the cache, not the trail. Besides, when I got to a cache I had to stop navigating the adventure and select go to the cache in order to log it as found. Then switch back to resuming the adventure to go after the next one. It's a matter of tailoring the adventure to the purpose. A scenic hike would focus on the trail itself. A bike ride would focus on the path. Geocaching focuses on the waypoints and it's expected to leave the trail when you get close to it.

For geocaching, an Adventure is a nice way to organize and list a grouping of caches on the device. But it's not really useful for going about collecting those caches since you have to exit the adventure mode to list and log the cache.

What I *really* want is to have the device support the List function so I can have multiple lists on the device just as I do in BaseCamp and select all or just one list to be displayed at a time. And I want to be able to display the items in the list in different ways instead of just what's closest to me. Besides closest and alpha, I'd like to order the waypoints/caches manually, in the order in which I intend to go after them. That is what would make my use of the device more productive and enjoyable. Using an Adventure gets me closer to being able to do that. But not just yet. ;)

I hope you find these suggestions useful in improving the product.

0 JOHNCNA over 12 years ago

<snip>
Then Garmin can load up a certain number of units (based on the visitation to the specific park) with the adventures found in said park. These units would be available for check out at the Park visitor center and it would allow visitors to have more fun and go places in the park they otherwise wouldn't. Once they find out how awesome Garmin's are, and how much fun Garmin's Adventures can be, they'll be more likely to buy a Garmin in the future. I know plenty of folks who bought a Garmin unit because they were able to tinker with one while visiting a park.

I know, I know, this might be far fetched but I've always been intrigued by the idea of using electronics to get more people outside.

Actually, Minnesota did something like this in some of their state parks, including 'loaner' GPS units.
http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_parks/geocaching/demo_parks.html

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

I installed on my Mac BaseCamp version 4.0.2.0 I have Etrex 30 SW 2.80 and Garmin Webupdater says that the device is updated.
I created an Adventure and downloaded another and installed to the Etrex30 device not to the SD, but I am unable to see in the device the icon Adventures what shall I do?

0 JOHNCNA over 12 years ago

You will need to download Etrex 30 beta firmware 2.87 to enable Adventures. You can get it here:
http://www8.garmin.com/support/download_details.jsp?id=5557

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

Dear John,
thanks for your quick answer, but since I have Mac the link you gave me does not work, I cannot download the beta firmware 2.87 because is a .exe file for windows.
The Garmin Webupdater says the the SW of my device is updated so I have to wait for the final version.
Or do you have other ideas?

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

Dear John,
thanks for your quick answer, but since I have Mac the link you gave me does not work, I cannot download the beta firmware 2.87 because is a .exe file for windows.
The Garmin Webupdater says the the SW of my device is updated so I have to wait for the final version.
Or do you have other ideas?

Use the free KeKa program to unpack and then drag the GUPDATED.GCD file to toe etrex\garmin\ folder. And restart the eTrex owh and don't forget to empty your trash bin with the eTrex connected (yes, it has a trash bin also, use JaVaWa Device Manager program to disable it).

But because you did not know this, it's better to wait for the release version. Before you know you need also learn the method to return to the current firmware version ;)

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

I played a bit with Adventures, but I have some problems and some questions:

I used high resolution images from my camera, but in the publishing process I got sometimes jQuery scripting errors.

After a converted the images to a lower resolution, the problems were gone.

I like to use a link in the description, see my example:
http://adventures.garmin.com/en-US/by/andre-wolff/rondwandeling-bij-mabodalen/

I did not succeed to construct a decent link. I tried it with html, but the description show the html code as you can see.
What is the correct way to define a link?

Although I selected metric units in BaseCamp, you see Miles in the Adventure.
How can I get km and meters there?

Finally I should like to know how I can edit the title/description of a picture. I see there now the file name, but I like to change this.
How should I do that?

Thanks in advance for your help!

If I look at this adventure on an iPad, I see that the text of the description overlaps the image.