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Appendix 4: 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 Lowrance or Eagle GPS unit are capable of
remarkably precise "high resolution" routes that can follow every S-
curve of a mountain highway. 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 compass 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 distance of a route waypoint. With a "high resolution" route, you
can set the off course alarm and the arrival alarm to small distances
somewhere between 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.)