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Appendix 5: Considerations When
Planning Highway Routes
Tips on Making Better Routes for Highway Navigation
How you make a highway route depends on your type of travel and
whether you prefer to use the GPS unit's compass rose screen, the map
screen or both for navigation. These factors determine how many route
waypoints to use, and where you place them.
A simple, straight-legged route by water or by air is easy to make, as is a
route following a square grid of city streets. Obstructions are usually few in
number, and you're traveling in a more or less straight line from waypoint
to waypoint.
Following a highway's twists and turns is different because all GPS units
link route waypoints in straight lines.
Some navigators prefer to follow a route visually on the map. They glance at
the route and the position indication arrow as the Custom Map moves across
their GPS screen. With one look, they can see the route symbols and the
highway they are following together, at the same time.
Other travelers prefer the simpler display provided by the compass rose
screen. The compass rose can literally point the direction to steer toward
the next waypoint in a route.
You may fall in yet another group of navigators who use both navigation
techniques, switching back and forth between the map and compass rose
screens during a journey.
"High Resolution" vs. "Low Resolution" Routes
MapCreate and your Brunton Atals unit are capable of remarkably precise
"high resolution" routes that can follow every S-curve of a mountain high-
way. This type of route — with a relatively large number of waypoints per
mile — is well-suited to compass rose navigation. With it, you can virtually
ignore the map screen and arrive at your destination using only the com-
pass rose.
Your GPS has a course deviation (or off course) alarm which will alert you
when you drift too far to the right or left of your route's center line. There is
also an arrival alarm, which alerts you when you get within a certain dis-
tance of a route waypoint. With a "high resolution" route, you can set the
off course alarm and the arrival alarm to small distances somewhere be-
tween 0.1 and 0.5 miles. (You can turn the alarms off or on, and you have
the option of turning the alarms' sound feature on or off as well.)
The amazing capabilities of GPS navigation can tempt first-time users to