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Does the Oregon (or any Garmin) have this feature I really need?

Former Member over 12 years ago

Hi, I wasn't sure which forum was best for my question... there doesn't seem to be a general hardware/software forum or even a trail-oriented forum.

I ride horses in thick woods on many winding, barely-marked trails. Often we ride off-trail and get "lost" (which is part of the fun). I've never used a GPS on the trail, but some of my friends have and they never seem to be able to do what I want:

I want the gps to show me a heading/route/whatever that takes me from my current location to a given waypoint (camp or otherwise) using the historical tracks already saved. A straight line in the woods is useless. So the idea is that I ride as much as possible with the gps to build up a bunch of tracks that I edit in BaseCamp for validity (i.e. edit out any off-trail stuff). Then, if we're a long way from camp and it gets dark or starts raining, I can get the shortest route back to camp using the trails.

I was looking at the Oregon 550t. Is it possible to do what I want (with any Garmin)? From what I can tell searching online, I can't actually get directions using the tracks but would have to settle for one massive saved track that included all of the possible trails and just use that like part of the map to guide myself.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

0 stuartmw over 12 years ago

I can't think of a way to do exactly what you want.

The Oregon, and other models, allow you to record tracks--a breadcrumb trail of where you've been. With that you have a record of where your trails are. Many models, including the Oregon have "trackback" feature but that is designed for you to go back the way you came. As I understand it that's not exactly what you want.

The Oregon also supports custom maps. You can probably use your track data (of the trails) to create a custom map. That said I don't think custom maps can be routable. That is I think your trails would just be lines on a map but the GPS wouldn't be able to follow them (i.e. give directions).

Maybe others have ideas and/or more insight.