Hiya, gang,
First post here. Been rooting around the forum to see if this had been covered before, since it’s probably a pretty “GPS 101” question, but didn’t see anything.
For a few hikes planned this summer, we may need to follow a couple of bushwhacks for which I have GPS tracks transferred to my 66i.
Doing some due diligence, I walked a test track loop around the house and yard and tried to go back and follow it using only the device, as if I knew nothing about the route I had just walked. I know tracks don’t give you TBT direction, so I wanted to be 100% sure I could interpret what I was looking at on the device when I was on unfamiliar ground. The results were sketchy, at best, but I am way open to the likelihood that it’s just operator error at this early stage.
I ran into a few issues that I wondered if anyone could clarify for me:
First, despite my checking the manual, and double-checking the definitions of the data fields I have selected in the on-screen dashboard, I have no idea what the heck the pointer is pointing at. It seems to just swing around randomly with no consistency. Is it pointing me back to the track? Doesn’t seem so. It is pointing me to either the start or end point? Doesn’t look that way. Is it pointing me to the next turn? Also doesn’t seem to be the case. Is it pointing me back to a turn I missed, or the point where I first strayed too far off the track? Nope. Often it looks like it’s just pointing off into the distance at nothing in particular. I know that can’t be right.
Secondly, I have on the data fields to tell me my course back to the track, and how far L or R I am off the track. Now I get that there will be some “drift” in the distance estimated, but some of what I’ve seen is just wildly inconsistent. (In the yard, away from the house, it’s particularly unnerving since there’s no dense tree cover back there.)
I have at times been standing directly on the track line and the dash is reporting I’m L or R of the line, sometimes by nearly a hundred feet. As I move to “correct” (even though visually I am directly on the line), the distance away gets higher. Start to go back the other way, and I’ve suddenly flipped to being off course on the other side of the track, even though I haven’t taken more than a step or two. I would be willing to chalk that up to just GPS margin of error, if it weren’t for the fact that the “to course” indicated to get me back to the track directly contradicts what the “off course” field is telling me. If the device tells me I’m left of the track, and to go south to get back to the track, but going south would actually take me *farther* to the left, it naturally raises some doubts about what the GPS is “seeing,” and why the information it’s reading seems to contradict itself.
I even stopped and just stood still a bunch of times to see if there was simply a lag issue, and to just give the device some time to settle down, collect its thoughts, and catch up.
Has anyone here had good luck following tracks? What was your methodology? Am I making dumb mistakes, or just not understanding what the device is (correctly) trying to tell me?
Thanks for any thoughts, gang!
