Chart plotters and routes. Is it always this hard?

[anoccasionalyachtsman]

I bought a Garmin 276cx and am finding out that it while its charting in fine, the rest of the software is a bad joke.

https://buy.garmin.com/en-GB/GB/p/539722

Firstly, if I set up a route with the odm as first mark it won't give me a bearing, distance or time to it. All the various selectable data fields can do is tell me where the next mark is from the odm or my present position. I could put the odm in as a 'goto' and that works, but then I need to switch to the route after the start and we're back to the same problem, bearing is to the next mark but one.

More seriously, if I put in a typical 'cans' course, it will usually ignore the route and choose the nearest mark to direct me to, but sometimes it's seemingly random.

Here's an example, wpts around where I live, and 'Winner' (Solent mark) thrown in for a distant point.

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipMIrrxQCi-EbpIbdm-j8LfCamZEvIcwTUtGAC78

This is the route I've set and activated.

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipMyoUMm86mFdnZ76YtsS1Vzj5edMI5raPZQpx2W

The magenta line on the chart is correct, but notice how it's decided to tell me the course (to steer) for Winner, when it should be showing Reigate, or as above, at least the CTS from Reigate to Gomshall.

My hunch is that some software which 'should' decide that I need to be within a certain distance from a point before switching to the next is completely missing, and this allows it to just choose any point. Oddly, I put Winner in because the first tests showed that it would just jump to directing to the nearest point, and I certainly didn't expect it to then jump to the farthest, but maybe that's part of the flawed logic?

Anyway. A discussion is being had with Garmin and I expect I'll be getting a refund. The question is what to do instead. Present use is in a keelboat, so waterproofness and portability were the prime reasons for the original choice. I may have to

Having spoken to various of my competitors I find that they're all just using 'goto' - are all systems this terrible?

What I want is to to know where the odm is in prestart, and what the course to the first mark is. I'd also like to be able to tell it not to switch to the next point until I'm within say 50m of the present one. Does any plotter or tablet-based nav software allow this?

ps. Don't ask me what the 'Dist to Point' is supposed to mean. Garmin don't know and it's always 0ft away. Could it be philosophical?

 

[savageseadog]

I never use routes on my Garmin 451 for the same reasons. The plotter assumes that the last mark in a route or the nearest intermediate mark is where you're going,. Useless. Another issue is that if you select a waypoint destination from current position it's impossible for it to display VMG. VMG is only displayable if you are in "Route" mode, ie set up and select a route. Useless. The plotter is brilliant in many ways but those bugs are bad. I have found a way of drawing a starting line, by using a route. For the Fastnet I wanted to draw exclusion zones but that was impossible, I probably can't complain about that.

 

[anoccasionalyachtsman]

I just don't understand how it can have got so spectacularly bad.

 

[anoccasionalyachtsman]

I never use routes on my Garmin 451 for the same reasons. The plotter assumes that the last mark in a route or the nearest intermediate mark is where you're going,. Useless. Another issue is that if you select a waypoint destination from current position it's impossible for it to display VMG. VMG is only displayable if you are in "Route" mode, ie set up and select a route. Useless. The plotter is brilliant in many ways but those bugs are bad. I have found a way of drawing a starting line, by using a route. For the Fastnet I wanted to draw exclusion zones but that was impossible, I probably can't complain about that.

Re: your start line hack, is that by putting the two ends in as points in a route and then looking at the distance off course?

I'll give mine a try and see if the VMG failing is something else I can complain about!

 

[savageseadog]

Re: your start line hack, is that by putting the two ends in as points in a route and then looking at the distance off course?

I'll give mine a try and see if the VMG failing is something else I can complain about!

Yes. I set the two ends as waypoints and then as a route, a nice black line then joins them. I'll be honest and say the line is OK but I'm not entirely sure whether when selected, the route function works correctly for the reasons already given. I might experiment with adding an extra waypoint to the beginning and possibly the end of the route as well. The VMG thing drove me nuts, it does actually say in the manual somewhere that VMG can only be displayed in route mode (found eventually) but who reads the manual? It's a very silly issue as VMG surely applies to navigation to a single waypoint.