Exercise 2Planning ahead: waypoints and routesThis Exercise is about entering waypoints and a route into your GPS receiver and navigating along the route in the field. So, it is about planning ahead. And this is really important for several reasons. First of all for planning a trip you have to do a detailed study of the map. The great advantage is that you will have the map "in your head" when you start walking/hiking. For security reasons this is always a good idea. Second you will already have waypoints, programmed in your GPS receiver. You only have to navigate from one point to the next in order to finish your trip. On the next map-extract we have indicated a small 3.1 km walk, for which we want to enter waypoints in our GPS receiver.
Map extract copyright © National Geographic Institute at www.ngi.be
Your walk will be differentYou will have to plan your own walk on your own map of your corner of the world, but it is important that you do it. In order to save up to 50% battery-power it is better to set your GPS receiver in "Simulation Mode" while you do the necessary settings and enter the waypoint-coordinates. Do it manually (at least once)A route is a series of waypoints, linked by straight lines (route legs), so in order to represent reality as good as possible, we need enough waypoints, so that the sum of all the straight lines in the route has about the same shape as the real trip on the map. This is rather tedious, but for this Exercise we insist that you do it manually on your GPS receiver, even if you would already have software to assist you. You must be able to do this without even thinking about it. Entering the waypointsWe have measured the UTM coordinates of the following 11 waypoints on the paper map and, yes, we entered them manually in our GPS76 on October 30, 2003. The GPS receiver in Simulator mode in order to save battery power.
Creating waypoints with the GPS76 goes as follows: Press and hold "Enter". Activate and change any field you like, especially the coordinates. When finished activate "OK" and press "Enter" again. This will save the new waypoint. On the next map-extract you can see where we had chosen our waypoints. We planned a waypoint at every turn in the track that we wanted to walk. This way the route, that links the waypoints through straight line segments, will very much look like the actual walk.
Map extract copyright © National Geographic Institute at www.ngi.be
Waypoint namesAs you can see, we named the first waypoint "CAR". This point is outside our walk and we will not incorporate it into our route. You can also see that we named our waypoints A1 to A10. This is good practice, because this way we can have several series in our GPS receiver, which start at number 1 (each starting with another letter). This is much clearer than having a series from 1 – 10, another one from 11 – 23 and so on. And when you want to add a waypoint to a series, this is much more flexible. If you have more series of waypoints in a small geographic area, you can very easily distinguish between the different series on the map page of your GPS receiver. The waypoints that you mark in the field, will automatically start at number 001, as this number is free. Creating a routeNow we have to create a route from our 10 waypoints A1 – A10. There are several ways to accomplish this task. The most intuitive is probably to use the map page. "Main Menu", "Routes", "Enter", "New", "Enter". Give the new route a name. "Exercise 2" will be fine. "Menu", choose "Use Map", "Enter". Find the series of waypoints A1-A10 and choose the right scale by zooming in or out. With the rocker key you place the Map Pointer on, or at least close enough to point A1, so that it becomes selected. Press "Enter" and move to the next point, A2 in our case. Pressing "Enter" adds point A2 to the new route. Continue till all points are in the route. You have to choose the points in the order that you want to navigate them. As we planned ahead, when we created the waypoints, in our case this is in chronological order from 1 to 10. In other situations, you would use the waypoints in another order. Especially when something goes wrong and you have to change your plans in the field. This is the reason why it is so important to do it now manually. If you never did it this way, how will you find out in an emergency case? We will deal with that in another exercise. Another method is to choose "Add Waypoint" instead of "Use Map". "Enter". On new menu choose "Waypoints", "Enter". This brings you to the "waypoints by Name" list. Choose A1 and press "Enter". On the information page of waypoint A1 "OK" will be selected. Press "Enter" again. A1 will be entered to the route. Using the rocker key descend to the dashed line. Press "Menu" and choose "Add waypoint", "Enter", "Waypoints", "Enter". Now choose "A2", "Enter", "OK", "Enter" etcetera till all waypoints are entered into the route. These two methods can be combined, as in the process you can always choose "Use Map" or "Add Waypoint". Our RouteOn the map screen of the GPS76 the result looks as follows:
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