No Turn by Turn Notifications when hiking (walking activity)

I have used my 6x on about 4 or 5 hikes now. Last week I updated the firmware to 4.30 and the next day did a hike - and the Turn By Turn notifications worked perfectly. I was quite excited! Then did another one this weekend and as usual, no TBT.

In all cases, even the one where it worked, I created the route in Plotaroute, exported it as a FIT file, then copied it to the /newfiles folder on the watch. It was my understanding that the watch generates the TBT as it imports the route. There are no Waypoints.

These are all about 10km hikes around local trails, with a lot of turns.

I actually use a Walk type activity renamed to Hiking. In all other respects, the watch navigates around the route ok.

  • How did you set up the original route in plotaroute? If you imported a gpx file, I don't think it automatically generates turn alerts; that happens when you create the route by manually clicking along. The FIT converter hasn't materially altered since it was installed, other than handling a few extra flavours of turn like sharp right/sharp left. Can't speak for the software upstream of it, but I've not had issues with TBT running or walking with my 6x.

  • Good you managed it.

    I programmed my own algorithm to calculate turn cues for any given track. The one of Garmin connect is very basic and misses a lot of obvious situations where no cue gets produced by it.

    Plotaroute I have to say got the whole cue editor wrong from the beginning Disappointed
    The reason is that they allow to set user defined cues only by location on a given course (by clicking on a map point). While that is fine for very basic courses it can´t handle any more complex ones. Imagine you have a course with laps included where the track overlaps itself various times and you want a cue to fire only e.g. the 3rd time you pass a certain location because now you want to go right instead of straight as the times before. An editor like plotaroute can not handle that (and neither can the garmin connect editor).

    The only cue editor I know which got it right is the one of RideWithGPS (in the premium version). It allows to set course points based on course distance instead of map position. With that you have full control over when a cue fires no matter how often the track overlaps itself.

  • You can also use Android navigation Locus Map (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=menion.android.locus) which have extension for Garmin to quick import the tracks (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.wearsoft.locus.addon.ciq). With Locus Map you can create directly on your phone track with auto-generated or customised TBT instructions and all export to watch by 2-clicks (even offline). 

    Or you can use navigation on your watch controlled directly by Locus Map on the phone and don't mess with import/exports at all.. Slight smile

  • I think the Locus turn cue editor has the same flaw as the one of plotaroute or garmin, it can only deal with basic tracks which neither have laps, overlaps or similar

  • No, they redesigned their route editor recently and now you should be able to access any part of the track going via same location and have full control what trackpoints are also TBT instructions. 

  • I think that they were all drawn by hand - ie I drew them all in the route planner. But not to worry. It seems to be working ok now. I have not been through all the other routes yet (only the ones I have actually walked already). Will check the others out over the next week or so.

  • I spent a lot of time on Locus before I finally bought the Fenix 6x. It initially looked very good - the voice turn notifications are really useful. The problem is the route planner is truely awful. The TBT generator was so wrong it was laughable, It got about 90% wrong. Totally - it would put in Left instead of Right, etc. The TBT points are not really generated by Locus, so it is not really their fault. But it was unusable. And the GPS system seems wrong somehow. It lost track so often (when it hadn't) that it became too unreliable. And creating a route on the phone is just not practical, even if the planner actually worked. I actually did do an import to the Fenix using the Garmin plugin, and that worked ok. But I find just copying the file over is even easier. And the navigation on the Fenix is so much better than Locus. I use Locus for car naviagtion quite often, and for that it seems to work well, but for hiking, no. 

    I still have Locus on my phone as a backup, but I import the routes from Plotaroute and that works fairly well.

  • I don't think so - it mainly uses BRouter and that is pretty bad. I think it would deal with car navigation ok, but it does not deal well with hiking routes. I was getting up around 90% wrong at one point. With Plotaroute I don;t think I have ever seen a wrong point yet. It misses a few that I have to add in manually, but have not seen a wrong one yet.

    I don't do running - so I don't have your problem with laps and the like. My worse problem is returning on the same track as I went out on. Plotaroute seems to handle that ok. Locus cannot handle overlaps, as you say and that is very common for me.

  • Just updated to latest. First TBT I checked - totally wrong (Left instead of right). Nightmare to move a point. Very frustrating. But not to worry - I am using Plotaroute now and that is so much better. And I can do it on the PC.

  • I just gave it a try but while it precalculated some turn cues I couldn't figure out how to add any additional ones. I could only add cues for all kind of special positions along the track.
    But that might all be me...