I believe this may have been raised before but just posted on the geocaching forums is that routes sent to an Etrex 30 aren't editable on the GPS. Just tried on my Montana and Etrex 20 with the same result. Is this intentional or a bug?
I'm not sure if it's intentional or not. If you set the activity profile in Basecamp to Direct before sending the route to the Montana it will be editable on the handheld. I don't know if that also applies to the Etrex.
Ah good tip, the user was sending a route for an automobile, so I tried the same. However still begs the question why routes other than direct aren't editable.
This has been true on several outdoor devices for some time. I suspect that at one point there were problems with routes being altered when/if the device recalculated them. To prevent this problem, the routes were effectively treated as “read-only” and I believe they were simply loaded without recalculating, but I could be wrong.
Another way around this, at least in older versions of BaseCamp and on my device, was to create the route on the desired map, switch to the Global Map and recalculate. This would create a route that was editable and reversible. There is the possibility that the calculated route on the device will differ from the one in BaseCamp, so always check it. The route only contains the user entered points, which is what my device (62 series) saves for routes created on the device (i.e. none of the calculated points following routable features are stored).
I don’t know if it works in the latest versions of BaseCamp or on other outdoor devices.
Must say it's not a feature that worries me as I hardly use it, but for those who do regularly send non-direct routes it does seem strange that they're not editable on the device like direct routes are.
Well as I said in my linked post I think the rationale is that if you've plan a route on a computer and transfer it you want the unit to follow that route.
BTW such pre-planned routes can have Direct sections and those won't be recalculated. The route is taken "as is".
