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Track or Route and fit or gpx file

skopek
over 4 years ago

Hi,

I'm planning a hiking trip in an area where I've never been before. The map I'm using is from Freizeitkarte. For planning plotaroute.com is used.

What is the best option, Track or Route?

GPX File:

Is it correct that track will just show the track but will not guide me back to the track when I lost it? If this is the case what is the advantage?

Route will always try to bring me back to the original path and shows me the shortest way to there?

FIT file:

Here you can't select Track or Route but you can select "Turn warnings" which might be useful.

What option should I use when downloading the file (GPX -Route, GPX-Track or FIT)?

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    FIT. More information, contains the turns and supports a wide range of alerts including sharp and slight turns, water stations... You don't need Turn Warnings - that puts in an extra field to give you a warning that there is a turn coming up as well as the turn itself, but the F6 does that automatically anyway.

    You should look at the setting to display the turns slightly early - the Fenix watches tend to signal the turn a little late, this places them earlier in the file to compensate that.

    Definitely experiment with it before doing the actual hike, check the list of turns to make sure they're properly signalling the trail forks that you need & so on. Try downloading a route which is at least a mile or so (some devices won't signal the turns on very short routes so your test appears to fail when it would work on any real route  - definitely true for the F5, don't know about the F6).

    As I recall the track is a long set of points showing the exact path along the ground, the route is a set of waypoints but doesn't define the exact path to take between them. You would probably want track of those two options, but I'd say just use Fit.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to mcbadger

    Thanks, I had the time to try today. I used the FIT file option. The turn warnings came in just right. I remember that ETA and ETE were quite wrong in the past (used it last year with FW 11.10) when using the "Resume later" option after a break. This was working fine.

    Two things I've noticed but I was not able to change but maybe someone know how to change it.

    - I left the track (course) and I just got the arrow displayed on the map and the distance to the original track. Is there a way to display a new route to the target. In Hike settings -> Routing -> Courses you can change between "Follow Course" and "Use Map". Initially it was set Follow Course" a change to "Use Map" didn't change the behavior.

    - Is there a to change the position or the size of the turn indicator?

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to skopek

    I think for both the answer is no unfortunately. For 1), you'd need to recalculate the route. Using the map on your watch to recalculate the route would require the same map on both watch and plotting software.