Now is a great time to sharpen your GPS skills. Join Touratech Adventure Expert and Touratech Rally Ride Coordinator, Eric Archambault for this in-depth, GPS specific skills class.
This class will focus on the Garmin Zumo 595 and Zumo 396 units, users with the Garmin Zumo 590, Zumo 395, Zumo 350, BMW Nav 5, BMW Nav 6 are also encouraged to attended as all of these units share the same platform.
You should finish with a solid understanding on all of the features, how to customize, and optimal set-up of your GPS unit for your next adventure. Loading and navigating with tracks will also be covered. Having your GPS Unit handy is helpful. If you need a GPS Unit Click Here!
TRANSCRIPT:
All right, this is the GPS Immersion Class for the Garmin Zumo 396, the Zumo 595 and as well as the BMW Nav 5 and Nav 6 units, so it would also cover the older Garmin Zumo 350 or 395, the Zumo 590 as well so all these units are listed. They are running the same platform, the same software, some of the things might move depending on the exact unit so all the screenshots are going to be from a Zumo 595. I do know that the BMW Nav 5 and Snap 6 units, some things are slightly different locations but for the purpose of learning about your unit, this is going to cover the bulk of it.
In this class, we’re going to go through and cover pretty much we’re going to go through all the menus, cover all the different setup things, touch base on why to set things up one way or the other or the pros and cons, as well as how to display tracks which is something that most of us have bought the GPS for the motorcycle to go and do things like the backcountry discovery route or plan trips ahead of time and go and execute those trips.
That’s what we’re going to cover here, and moving on, we’re going to start with the physical overview on the unit and only a couple of things here to really touch on. It is a pressure type touchscreen so you’re not going to need to worry about any special gloves. It does have a micro SD card slot which is inside the battery box. The 395s and 396 Zumos they have a separate little compartment. I know the owner’s manual will cover it but if you just pull up all the rubber flaps too you will find it.
All the units covered here do you have that expandable memory option, which is something that is very nice, and the other really important one is the power button, and it sounds really simple and most of the time if you press the power button screen goes off, you assume it’s off, and on these units you need to hold the power button down until the prompt comes up saying, “Do you want to shut this down?” Otherwise, it will stay with the screen off running until it kills the battery so that’s why generally when you grabbed on this out of the drawer if you haven’t been practicing that, you’ll find that the battery’s dead but not end of the game thing where your GPS unit is going to be on a powered mount most likely.
Quick outside the unit thing before we dive into the inside. Now, we’re going to get into the all the internal pages and menus and things so this is going to be the deeper dive into it. We’re going to start off, we’re going to work from this screen from the main screen here. We’re going to work from there down, and then, just drill through it and cover everything, and as I mentioned before, some of the similar units do have some different apps or tools in there.
Then, some of these can be customized. I’ll try to call out when something has been customized first, having it at the factory setting. This unit was factory reset before most of these screenshots were taken so should be pretty similar but we’ll see if there’s anything weird there. Starting on the top row, we do have a number of things on the far left-hand side. It’s going to be your GPS strength indicator, obviously, where I just have one red bar, don’t really have good satellite reception there and that was because this was taken indoors, and then, on the far other side, you’re going to have the battery, which is your typical battery indicator.
Depending on your GPS unit where all the units in this series current generation Zumos, and then, the Nav 4 or Nav 5 and Nav 6 rather we’re all designed to be used in a powered mount. You’re looking at about a four to six-hour battery life. It’s enough that you can do some planning and mess around with the unit but it’s really not designed to be used to navigate without being plugged into power. We’ve got those two, and then, the other four items up top there are going to be actually shortcuts as well, so besides showing you something they are going to give you a shortcut to a menu so you don’t have to go through all your settings.
There’s a lot of those sprinkled throughout the unit as well, which is generally well thought out. The next one over is that little motorcycle icon, and this is going to be your transportation mode. This is a feature that they carried from the outdoor units that I really like. You have these three modes; automotive, motorcycle, and off-road. It doesn’t really matter what you do with these.
The big takeaway is all your changes to your map and vehicle and your navigation, all those settings are going to be in each, live in each profile be independent, so it means you can have your off-road profile using Topo maps if you add them to your unit, and maybe a different set of trip data information pulled up, then your regular motorcycle one, and you can have your automotive maybe the routing as being quickest route, where on the motorcycle maybe you’re using some of the adventurous routes or the more curvy roads seeking stuff.
It allows you to change a bunch of little presets inside of the unit without, and then, having them save so you can change between them with one click of one button instead of having to go and change a handful of functions. Those just save you a lot of time unless you really dial it in for each thing. The nice thing too, you do have those icons and we’ll just do a quick view here of the setup menu, you can see that they’ll put those icons there. It gives you that visual reminder that this change is only going to be affecting this transportation mode, so really strong feature set there. Something that is really good to have and if you take advantage of it, you can have your GPS really dialed in and almost like you have, you’re using a different GPS for different applications where it can be set up differently, so that is something that just really a great feature.
All right, so that wraps up the transportation modes, and then, go back here, and back to the top row. The next one over is going to be your Bluetooth pairing center, so you hit that Bluetooth symbol, and it’s going to just shortcut you to the Bluetooth setup so you can set up your phone to talk to the unit or going out to the headset and many times both, so won’t really get into all the step by step on it. It is pretty intuitive. Its standard setting up Bluetooth on a device so, yeah, that’s there.
We go back and look at that top menu again. Dead center, we have the clock and if you click on that, it will give you a set up so you can manually change the time. This is something I always just leave in automatic because it’s just good to know the real time, so you can change it if you want. If you want to have it five minutes fast so you’re not late to work or something, that’s something you can do, but generally, that’s left at automatic.
The final one to discuss is going to be the little gas pump, and this only shows if you’re in the motorcycle transportation mode and when you click on it, it does give you your fuel tank setups, so this is a neat feature they put on these units where you can set up that you have a certain size tank or certain range and it’ll track your fuel economy. It’s not tracking it real-time but you can say I can go 200 miles a tank and it will give you those alerts and things like the dynamic fuel stops will start showing you those fuel stops as you come up on the BMW Nav units, if it’s a GPS prepped bike, it’s actually looking at your fuel gauge and talking to the bike so you don’t get some of these setup things because it is actually fully integrated in, so really cool feature if you want to use it, if not, you can just have it not doing anything and you don’t need to take advantage of it so that’s something they put in on these units.
That’s going to wrap up that top bar and we’re going to move on now to the where to, and just dive right in. On that, we do have a lot of stuff here. This is going to be a customizable menu, and we’ll cover that once we get to that point but you do have a lot of things here, and we’ll just start at the top and work our way around, so at the very top we have searching nearer, and generally, it’s going to default to where I am now.
In this case, I’m in Seattle, and it’s going to search around me, but it does give you a lot of options and you can search if you are on an active route or you going down the highway, you can look at the upcoming exits and that can be nice if you’re looking for fuel ahead of you, different places so it’s something that most of the time you’re going to be looking near you, the looking at upcoming exits is something that the newer GPS have started doing, which is really nice so you don’t have to look at a whole bunch of gas stations behind you if you’re looking for fuel up ahead, and even looking for hotels and things like that I found using the GPS there’s times we just don’t have cell signal so you can start making those plans or, at least, pull over and kind of look down the road and see when the next hotel is even if you don’t have cell phone reception, so there’s still a lot of the country that that happens once you’re in the middle of nowhere.
That’s going to be the first one there. The next one, we’re going to move over in the enter search field. On this, you can click on that, and you start punching in an address or you can put in any sort of point of interest or location name to look up. I generally recommend if you know you’re going to be looking up a restaurant, you go into the categories and dial it in as far as you can just to minimize your search results, get something a little more fine-tuned but you can just put up in there gas station or you can put in an actual address.
When you click on it, the top gives you kind of that default keyboard, and they do the big buttons by default so you have half the keyboard and you have to hit the over arrow to get the other half, and it helps if you’re wearing gloves and you’re trying to punch in and maybe bouncing down the road or on the 300 series unit that have the smaller screens. If you hit the globe, it will pop up the regular QWERTY keyboard, and you can even go into [inaudible 00:10:43] I’ll show you where it is [inaudible 00:10:44] set up when we get to that point, you can select other style keyboards or even get rid of the big button style, so something that a lot of people it is kind of annoying having to scroll it back and forth, but if you do hit that globe, it gives you just that small keyboard to put everything on the screen at one time.
This is the same keyboard that’s going to pop up when you’re doing anything that you’re typing in, so all this will apply everywhere that you have a keyboard option. Now, back to it, the where to menu or sub-menu. The little three lines in the corner up top left, upper left hand that Garmin uses as their shortcut to a menu. Whenever you see that there is some sort of menu there.
A lot of times it is just to reset but other times it is more in-depth. Up top is just a screen and you hit it and that bottom screenshot is showing what’s going to pop up, so setting home location and the home one, if you’ve never clicked on it before, it will have you set it up the first time you hit it, but if you want to set a new one, you can do that, and then, as I mentioned all these little search terms or tools here in this field for the where to, it is a customizable menu so this is where you remove those shortcuts by clicking it, then, I’ll just get a little X that you could hit and delete them, and then, you can rearrange in which will cover at the end of this part.
Now, jumping back to the menu, we’ll go through all these default menu items, and then, we’ll go through some of the other options that you can add or change it to. First one that we’ve kind of touched on a little bit is the go home. The first time you set it up, you’ll be able to select where your home address is so you could, if you’re sitting at home the easiest way is you set it up there you say, “Yeah. Use my current location.”
Then, it will remember that, and every time down the road when you hit go home, it just starts routing you home. They also give you the option to enter your address manually or if you have looked up your address recently, you can use your recently found but once it’s set up to change, it will use that side menu on the upper left-hand corner, otherwise, you hit it and you just go where you want to go.
The next one over is going to be address and this you simply just type it, you hit that, and it will give you that keyboard menu and you type in an address and they’ll take you there. The nice thing with this generation of units is they don’t require you to put in the address backwards like some of the older Garmins did. You can just put in the street number and you type in the address like you would write it, so that’s something that’s nice as the units have gotten a little bit smarter over the years.
Then, the next one is going to be saved and this is what traditionally was called waypoints, and this would still be called waypoints on any of the hiking units or outdoor units, and they just, they renamed it to make it more comfortable for people who aren’t as used to the GPS, so these are anything that if you make a waypoint on the unit itself or go there or if you download the backcountry discovery route for Washington, and there’s a lot of the gas stops, and any of the backcountry discovery routes as part of the GPX file that you would import and that’s where they would go.
Anything that you put into the unit, this is also where you’d go if you wanted to clear those out, on the current generation Zumos and Nav units you can’t delete items out of it through Garmin Basecamp, you have to do it on the units. If you have old waypoints from a trip and you don’t want them anymore, you just need to go to the save menu there and you can, there will be the option to delete stuff out.
The next one over will be recent, and this just pretty much if you type in something and say take me there, this saves it, and this is one that I do use a bit myself where I tend to go to the same places over and over again so it’s nice where you can search back a whole bunch of them. Now, we move down the next row and categories, and this is where you’ll be able to go down and click on it and it will give you the all the options; restaurants and lodging and pretty much everything you think of the kind of standard fare that you’d see there.
That does help if you know you’re looking for a hotel, not a restaurant, you can filter it down so the search will be faster or if you want a certain type of restaurant you can, again, filter it down so that does help speed up the results especially if you’re in a big city or something like that where there is a lot of information for it to go through. Next one over is motorcycle locations, and this just gives you a list of all the motorcycle dealerships that it knows of in the area from the area you’re searching. On the BMW Nav units, it normally shows you BMW dealers rather than every type of motorcycle dealer.
Trip planner is a tool that I don’t really use myself. It is handy if you know you want to go to multiple locations and you just want it to auto route you, you can say, “Make a trip.” Put in three different addresses and instead of having to go one address to the next, normally I just say, “Take me to the first place.” Then, I set it up again but this it is a feature that they have, not something I’ve ever actually used.
Gas stations, this would be one of those categories but it is separated out because it’s something that you generally search for. Cities would be another type of shortcut that you could you have. I do like that one if I know I’m on a multiple day trip and I’m just trying to cover ground, a lot of times I’ll put my destination city in and not worry about the actual destination until really close.
Then, finally, you have add shortcut, and then, this will pop over to the next screen here and you get your list of things that you can add and you can actually save searches or the categories as we had before, you can go in and pick a certain type of category, so it gives you a lot of things and any of these you’d add as their own thing. A lot of the newer units do have Foursquare, and TripAdvisor, so you can even use their searches. It gives you a lot of options and just dial it in for the things that you use and clear out the things you don’t.
The next screen here, this is kind of the way that I would set it up. T are the ones that I find I use most of the time. Normally, once in a while I’ll need to look up a coordinate, gas station is always handy but normally I’m typing in an address or a business name, which you can just use from that top field, and then, if you do want to rearrange it any of this stuff, you just press on an option, hold it until it kind of buzzes or vibrates or shakes, just like you would on an iPhone, I believe the Android phones do the same sort of thing. That’s how you’d rearrange it, and then, to delete, you would use that menu tool up in the upper left-hand corner and saying get rid of items and get rid of whatever you don’t need. It’s nice that it is adjustable and you can get the things you’re going to use the most up top.
All right, and now, we’re going to go back to that main menu screen and we’re going to do view map. That’s probably the screen you’re going to spend the most time looking at. All right, and then, on the map screen, there is a lot of information that is tucked around, and we’re to start at the top where it says acquiring satellites. If you were doing turn-by-turn navigation, it would give you your upcoming turn information there.
On the left-hand side, you do have the plus and minus button and those would be for your zoom as much as we’d all love that the GPS could do the forefinger and thumb gestures like most touchscreen devices, unfortunately, they do not, so you do need to use the plus and minus zoom buttons. On the upper right-hand corner, you do have the scale, and this, any of the top-down views you will have on the 3D viewer the automotive view, you don’t have it because there is no actual scale on the map.
Then, as we move down the bottom left-hand corner is the back button, so if you’re just on the screen following the map, that will take you back to your main page. If you have panned around, it just re-centers on top of your location and we’ll touch on that a little bit more when we get there. The next one will be where it has speed, and then, if the GPS does know what the speed limit is, it will turn red if you are speeding, and if you click on it, it functions as a shortcut to your trip computer.
This has a lot more information. You can set multiple trip odometers, you can, it will give you your actual GPS accuracy and feet, and then, your latitude, longitude, elevation, so a lot of this isn’t information you need all the time. I’ve used this screen before when I’m commuting and I know where I’m going and I can kind of try to see what my moving average is, day to day or something like that. It exists, if you do want to reset this, it is the menu shortcut in the upper left-hand corner, and then, if you hit the back button it will just take you back to your map screen.
On this, the next one over its going to be the second data field, which is, in this case, it’s showing us fuel range, but if you click on it, it does give you three other options, so you do have direction, time of day, elevation, and fuel arrange as options for that data field, and whichever one is most useful for you, if your bike doesn’t have a clock on it [inaudible 00:20:53] it’s nice to know the time of day but most motorcycles do have that these days, so elevation or direction are neat too, so it’s up to you, but those are your options there.
Then, finally, we’re going to have the wrench in the corner and that is going to be your map tool, or map tools rather, and when you click on it, the upper left-hand corner will show the default screen, and some of these are shortcuts to other screens and some of them are things that are setups here, so stop if you were actively navigating. It would just stop that navigation, volume would give you, your volume controls and media player would pop up on the side, so sometimes you can only have one of these selected at a time.
On the bottom, I do have the trip data selected, so you have three additional data fields and anything that you had as an option are shown on your trip computer, it can be pulled up there. If you wanted to know when sunset was or something like that, you could have that shown. The upper right-hand corner that shows every possible thing you can put into your map tools, little pop-up menu. I’d recommend if there’s something you know you’re not going to use or you feel redundant or something like that, get rid of them, that way when you pop that menu up, it is as short as possible, just to keep things streamlined.
All right, so we’ll move on to actually viewing the map. On the top screenshot, that is just a north up map display with the 3D arrow as the icon, and the important thing to note is that 3D arrow is in the center of the screen, sometimes if you’re going to track up, you’re a little bit further back, but it’s still going to be centered left to right, and it does have all those data fields and tools and everything that we discussed before.
On the bottom screen, you notice a lot of those data fields are gone, and then, that 3D arrow is no longer centered. It’s a function that you can do on the GPS and it is helpful if you want to look ahead or maybe you’re following a track, you missed a turn and you want to zoom back or scroll back, you can with a finger, drag the map around, and in that kind of painting mode, it’s nice that you can go and see other things but you need to hit that back arrow, and then, get your regular map back or you can ride off the map or you’ll just have the map is not going to stay with you then.
I found it’s easy if you’re trying to, if you’re going down especially a bumpy road, you go to hit the zoom, you might accidentally end up in a different view and you need to hit the back button to get back there. It’s a neat tool, something that’s easy to accidentally pan it some, and then, not have it follow you anymore, if that’s the case, hit the back arrow as well as if you’re normally, if you’re running in a 3D view and you find yourself in a top-down view, you’ve probably touched the screen and maybe you’re trying to hit something else and you just hit the map itself and you’re going to want to hit that back arrow.
A real common issue people have had just really important to know it is nice to be able to scroll about like that but just hit the back arrow. If the screen doesn’t look quite right, try hitting the back arrow and it’s either going to take you back to the main screen or everything it’s going to snap back to that normal top view there.
The next one is going to be creating a waypoint or as they call them on the current or on these units it would be a safe place but outside of this series of units, they’re still going to be, everyone’s going to refer to them as a waypoint, so the way you’d create that is when you’re on that map screen, you’re just going to touch and press for a second and it pops off, it will be like that upper left-hand screenshot where it has that little arrow, and you can touch around there, if you are using, I found with the city maps a lot of times it’ll give you an address, and it’ll give you go up or down the street a little bit, but if it’s just a park or a location out in the woods, you’re not going to, it’s not going to have that option.
But once you have that little flag where you want it, in this case, it says coordinates, sometimes it will say address, you touch on that, it will give you the option or a pop over the screen that’s going to be the one right next to that, so it will say the coordinates, what kind of category is there, and then, if you want to save it, you can hit save, and then, you’ll get the menu, you can type a name, whatever you want, hit done. It will be saved. If you just were scrolling around, you found where you wanted to go, and you drop one, and you just want to take you there, you could do that too, but generally, I haven’t found a reason to do that either.
Waypoints are really nice to have. I really recommend if you’re camping and you kind of date, riding out from a campsite, make a waypoint or a safe place, that’s your campsite, so if you do get lost, you can say just take me back there. These I use a lot for marking where my campsite is, marking the trailhead if I’m using the GPS on a dirt bike.
If you are out with a group and somebody has a mechanical failure and you need to leave a bike out there, you can mark a waypoint where you left their bike, so when you come back you’re not just trying to remember what road you were down, you can navigate back to that location. It is a really useful tool and that’s how you go about it. On some of the older units, there was a waypoint manager and it was, there was multiple ways to do it on these, you just have to touch the screen and go from there.
Okay. Now, we’re back to that main menu so covered all the map stuff, you said you do spend a lot of time there but most of the time it’s following, not actually pressing things and doing stuff so not as much to go through. We’re going to start on the bottom left-hand side of this main page, and first one is going to be the stop button. This just cancels any active navigation. If you punched in an address, you wrote there, it doesn’t, you got to park down the street, it doesn’t realize you’re there yet, you can hit stop and it will stop trying to get you the rest of the way there.
The other one that I find a lot is if you’re, you needed to get [inaudible 00:27:53] you say take me home and you get close enough that you don’t need the turn-by-turn and it’s just kind of annoying, you can hit stop and it will cancel any of that instruction coming at you so that’s what that does. Next one over is going to be apps. On many of the older units, it was tools or functions or something like that. Garmin has tried to hip it up a little bit and they call it apps. You can’t download or buy new apps for it or anything like that, it’s just that’s where, what they call the tools now.
If we go into the menu there is a bunch of items here. We have three pages worth and this is not a customizable menu, so you can’t rearrange it, and as I mentioned, you can’t add or subtract anything, it is what it is. Depending on the unit some of the BMW Nav units do you have some different apps in here, and then, depending on which version of the Zumo 300 or 500 series you have, they did vary a little bit model the model, so most of the stuff is going to be the same, might be in a slightly different order but we’ll just start going through these and kind of cover what they are. A lot of them it’s going to be kind of quick here.
Trip planner and this one, we kind of ran into this before where you can put in a bunch of addresses and have it make a trip for you. It’s not something that I use generally if I’m going to go to multiple locations, I just put them in each time, but this is the exact same menu as the where to, and then, the head trip planner, it’s the same thing.
The next one is going to be share route, and between the Zumo units and the BMW Nav units, you can share routes. They use the Bluetooth between devices. I don’t recommend navigating with routes because they are map dependent, which is why we’re going to talk about tracks a whole bunch at the end here, and if you watch the earlier video on navigating with tracks, really going to track first routes and the pros and cons, and why for especially backcountry travel strongly recommend you use tracks routes are almost guaranteed to not give you the results you want. But if you have one and you want to share it, that’s how you can do it wirelessly.
Live track, this does require you to have your smartphone synced in, I believe the Garmin app, and it’s something that people can see where you are on a map. It’s using your smartphone to kind of do that, sharing where you are thing that generally I’d recommend using a Garmin inReach or Spot was one that a lot of people did use in the past but the inReach platform is the one that I recommend where it’s satellite communication, two-way transmitting your location.
Live track if you’re just doing street riding, the city it’s neat but I don’t want people to think that where it’s doing the same sort of thing as the dedicated satellite transponder, its doing it over a cellular network, so if you’re in the backcountry odds are, it’s not going to work and there’s no SOS functionality to it. You’re just doing some city rides and you want to share it with your family, you can set all that up but we’re not going to get into any of that.
Next is going to be tracks and we’re going to double back here at the end of this and go through that menu separately. We’ll just continue banging out a lot of these, and then, we’ll go back and we’ll end this on tracks. Pandora and Spotify if you have your phone synced up, you can have those, have the menu for those on your screen so it gives you the option to control Pandora or Spotify from your phone into the GPS, into your helmet.
Long rides, music is nice so you do have that ability. Media player, same sort of thing. It lets you get to your music in your phone, and control it going into your headset. Smartphone notifications, this one it’s just going to let you control what’s going to pop up on your screen or not. If you want music streaming but you don’t want text and stuff shown, this is where you can have all that control.
Next one up, the third row, compass and this is kind of a neat screen if you’re off-road or sort of like the trip computer if you don’t need the map, and you don’t really care. It gives 10 ten data fields for the trip computer type stuff, and then, you get a compass on half the screen, so the battery life is not good enough on these units. I’d recommend using them for hiking but it’s kind of that hiking type display, so like I said I’ve used those type of things when I don’t care about the map. If I’m commuting or just messing around and don’t want the map, but just interested to see all the clocks or something when I pause and look down.
Fuel settings, this is the exact same menu that we shortcut it from the main screen. This is just its normal place, so there’s that. The tire pressure and only the 595 and the 590 Garmin Zumos will have this, and Garmin sells additional tire pressure sensors that you can put onto the bike, they’ll talk to it. It’s sort of like most the current production bikes have built in, so if you’re using those, that’s where you’d set those up and set your pressures and all that.
The VIRB remote, so the VIRB is Garmin’s action camera. They’ve had a few generations of it. The neat thing is this would be your remote. You could have on the side of your screen, on your map the start and stop buttons if you are using the Garmin VIRB with your GPS. I believe the BMW Nav units don’t have that function.
Next one down is round trip, so it’s kind of another, you’re just want to do a ride that’s X amount of miles or certain number of hours and you don’t really feel like planning it, you can kind of say, “I want to ride for three hours.” It’ll have you doing out and back. I’ve never talked to somebody that’s use this function. It exists. It’s good for that.
Track back, and this is another one that I’d caution maybe using off-road depending. It will take your active track, and then, turn it into a route going backwards, so if you get lost, you get turn-by-turn to follow your way out. If you’re way out in the woods and you’re maybe not using road maps, and you’re using Topo maps or something, it might not work super well, so I’d recommend just having your breadcrumb trail shown on there, but that’s what that is for.
Phone, lets you do all the phone things if you’re synced up, so making calls and such. Service history that does let you kind of put some of that in there. I personally have an app on my phone instead but if you wanted to leave it in the GPS, you can, and then, I believe as long as your GPS is always on there, on the bike when you’re riding, it does keep track of the mileage a little bit for you.
Smartphone link, that’s where it comes to traffic and weather overlays through the Garmin app, through your smartphone. That’s your controls there. Foursquare is exactly what that sounds like, seeing kind of the reviews. Where I’ve been, and that’s just your travel history. That’s duplicated a little bit on your or duplication of what your active tracks is but they just set it up a little bit differently there. I think someone was just trying to make some of the archaic old set up a little bit easier to digest.
Help is a pretty basic user’s guide. Last spot is the place you parked. I believe it just works off of last place you turned off your unit. Then, helmet guide, this is actually a list of every state and their helmet laws and eye protection laws, so I always wear a helmet with glasses or a face shield down, but if you like to have the wind in your hair, and it’ll let you know that you can go without a helmet, so those are all the apps. Like I said there’s a lot of stuff that’s the other phone related that we’re not going to really dive into or just not stuff that most people are using, so there is that and we will cover the tracks at the end.
We’re going to hit that back arrow and go back to the main screen again. Volume will be the next one. You click on that, if you don’t have anything hooked up, it will just give you the, “Hey, you don’t … you’re not getting any volume right now.” When you hit the wrench up top, it will give you all the settings. You can control the volume of the different functions differently, so you could have your music louder than your phone and things like that, and this one screen I know does, is a little bit different on the 396 Zumos, but it’s the same information, they just tweak the menu.
There is that, so if you’re taking phone calls and nobody can, you can’t hear anybody, it might be that your phone is just turned down. There is that, and back to the main screen again. Then, go to settings, and this is another really big one with a whole bunch of stuff. We’ll dive in there.
First one is going to be updates, and generally, when you hit the updates thing it’s just going to tell you to plug it in the computer and give you the instructions for updating it on the computer. The Zumo 396 does have Wi-Fi updates, and on that unit it will give you the kind of try to get you synced up with a Wi-Fi to do the updates, but on the older ones, it’ll just say you need to plug it in to Garmin Express on your computer and explain how to do that.
Maps and vehicles. This one we will click on, and you can see both maps … Maps and vehicles the navigation, we’re in motorcycle mode so you do have that visual reminder cue right there. But if we hit on maps and vehicles, we’ll kind of blow out that one a little bit here. The first one is vehicle and that’s going to be your icon shown on the map and clicking on that, you’re going to have that one down below bottom right-hand corner, and in that case, it’s selecting the 3D arrow.
On this, your map orientation or map view is really important. The 3D arrow if you’re doing any of the top-down view so north upper track up, I really recommend, whatever you choose, you want to make sure you can see it clearly and you can see your direction of travel and I get a couple of examples for the map view on that but go through and pick an appropriate one that is going to be easy to see.
We’ll jump over here, and so, for map view, you’re going to have three options and up top, you have the 3D view. This is your default one that most people are the most comfortable with and it works well if you’re driving across the state or something like that. I do not recommend it for tracks and a lot of it is used on have really good scale. I recommend just watching the navigating with traction tips and tricks video where we go to a lot of really deep discussion on the pros and cons on all these, but that’s the one that people default to.
Like I said just don’t recommend it for tracks. The next one where normally when people want more information or want an actual scale is going to be track up, which you’ll always be going up on the screen, which is nice but it’s easy to lose track of north, and that’s going to be that bottom left-hand view. Then, the one that all of us at Touratech use and really recommend for navigating with tracks and I find myself using it more and more, in general, is north up. You always know where north is and you do have a real scale and it’s real easy to reference paper maps so that’s kind of a really quick break down of those three views.
You can set it up differently for different things but that’s my two cents on it, and then, you do really see with that cool motorcycle on the top view or in the 3D view top center when you’re looking top down, it’s definitely not as easy to see or make out probably the direction of travel, so something to keep in mind there.
Moving down through next thing is map detail, and you only have three options there. You have less normal and more. Normally, I just run normal. The maps these days tend to show a lot of detail anyways. I think this is a little bit of a legacy feature from the older units that if you’re running a lot of detail, it really bogged the unit down. I don’t really notice that on any of the current generation stuff. I guess one time I may be back off the detail when I’ve used the Topo maps in some instances at certain zoom levels it maybe gets a little overwhelmed with information, so you can dial it back. It exists, normally, you don’t need to mess with it.
Next one down is going to be map theme. Seems to be more of a national type layout, so Garmin HV or just Garmin is the default. I only recommend staying with that. The next one we’ll go to the top right-hand screen there or screenshot. Map tools, and this is the same menu that when we’re on the map and we hit the wrench and it’s shortcut to map tools, this is just another place where that lives.
Map layers, that one, and that’s if you do have your phone synced up, you want traffic overlay, you can do that. The up ahead places, and then, your trip log, which would be your active track, you can control whether those shown or hide those things if you don’t want it, so the up ahead places, and then, selecting what you want to see up ahead. It’s kind of easy to maybe get set that up going off of your, the shortcuts on the map screen, but to turn it off, the easiest way is to go through here, the map layers, and make sure it’s unchecked.
Maybe not the most intuitive there but that is if you find that you looked up and you want to see gas stations ahead, and you can’t turn it off, you go to map layers and you just turn off the up ahead, you’ll be good to go. Rider alerts, you can select things if you want alerts for animal crossings, railroad crossings. Probably the really big one is school zone. It lets you know to slow down so that’s something that exists. You can turn it on, turn it off, no guarantees on how accurate it is.
Next one is going to be auto zoom and I recommend disabling that. The idea behind it is especially if you’re in like the 3D automotive view is you’re going down the highway, you know you’re going to go down the highway for the next 100 miles, it will zoom out, and then, when you get close to an exit, it will zoom in and give you the detail. I really like to just have a set zoom level and have that constant so when I look at the map and I look [inaudible 00:44:08] on the map I can translate into something in my head where if it’s always changing, it’s a lot harder to do that. I recommend disabling it, but that’s what it does.
Then, my maps, and this one is going to show you all your old maps you have in the unit, and you can select and deselect maps. You can have maps that maybe you don’t want shown in all the cases, and this is where your different ride modes comes at handy where if you have City Navigator, which is your road maps, you can also have Topo maps in the unit as well, but to have Garmin show 100k Topo, which is the Topo scale that most people use, you need to disable City Navigator.
In the hierarchy of maps from Garmin, the GPS if it has City Navigator enabled, will never show you 100k Topo because City Navigator in its mind has more information on it, even if you’re someplace that there’s no roads to show. If you have Topo maps into your unit, you want to make sure that you have it enabled when you want to use it, and this is where you have to kind of go through a couple of screens to get to this menu. This is where the different ride modes or transportation modes comes in handy because you’d have that off-road one with Topo always selected and City Navigator disabled, and you have Topo enabled, so it’s just that one click instead of going through three or four pages to try to get to that menu, so there’s that.
Now, where we go back to that settings page. We’ve gone through updates and map and vehicle, and we’re going through navigation now. All right, so navigation, first one’s going to be route preview, and this is just when you punch in an address or select a point of interest, you can say, “Take me there.” It’s going to show you kind of a overview map and I like to see that just to make sure it’s the direction I want to go or it’s not, obviously, in the wrong area or something like that.
Next option down is going to be calculation mode and with this one, you have four different options so first one is faster time. It’s going to calculate the fastest way. The next one is going to be adventurous route, and this is going to try to pull you to fun road so they base it on like hilly roads and windy roads and trying to keep you off the highway.
Next one is going to be off-road, and this is going to be the way the crow flies, so if you’re, the only time I could see this really useful is maybe if you’re on a boat or in an airplane, it’s not going to, it’s just going to be a straight line from wherever you are to the point that you want to get to, so maybe if you’re in a desert and you’re walking but that’s what the off-road one is. It’s something that’d be easy to misconstrue as something else, so off-road is the way the crow flies, and then, finally, you have shortest distance, which is exactly that. It might take more time but it will be the shortest number of miles.
The next is going to be adventurous route settings. This is where you get to dial in how much hills, how much curves, and how much highway avoidance you want. Next one down, we’re going to go to fatigue warning, and that one, it will just kind of tell you, “Hey, probably take a break. You’ve been on the road for a while.”
Off route recalculation, you get three options on this one. You have automatic and we’ve all probably come across this. You miss a turn or you know a better way, and then, it beeps at you and tells you to turn around or it goes recalculating and tries to either pull you back into that or it creates a whole new route based on where you are at that point. You can have it as automatic, you can have it, never do that, or you can have it where it prompts and goes, “Hey, you’re off route, you want to recalculate.” I normally leave it in automatic but you do have the three options.
For the avoidances, U-turns, carpool lanes, unpaved roads, highways I believe is one in there as well, so it’s your standard avoidances. Custom avoidances is kind of a neat one where you can select roads or even areas on the map to avoid, so this might be nice if you know there’s construction or something like that, not a feature I’ve ever taken advantage of but that’s what it’s there for.
Then, finally toll roads. You can have it, in this case, it’s defaulted to always ask if it’s going to route you down a toll road, you’d have it say, “Never take me down toll roads.” Just give you some options there. Restricted mode, it turns off some things when you’re riding. That’s what it is right there. The GPS simulator would be for, if you are using it indoors, and a lot of times if you don’t get a GPS signal, they’ll stop looking and kind of go into a simulator mode, so that’s that. That’s the navigation section of settings. Let me go back to that settings menu there.
We’ve scrolled down on the second or third page of it now, and we’re not going to go too crazy on the rest of these. On display, it will give you your option for the orientation either landscape or portrait. I always run my GPSes in landscape, but you do have the option there. It will give you the color mode, will be a demo mode, night mode or automatic, and you’ve probably noticed and even some of these slides, just kind of flip flop so day mode, it’s a light background with dark things on it. At night, it goes to the dark background with the roads and other things being lighter, and then, it normally ends up kind of dialing back the brightness, so just one of those things, at dusk, you’ll catch out of the corner of your eye and go, “I don’t know what changed to my GPS.” It flashed or something, and then, probably half hour after dusk it kind of dims a little.
I only leave it in an auto mode. It works really well, but if you wanted it to always be super bright or always super dark, you could do that, but automatic, there’s a reason why it’s the default. It works really well. Brightness, you can turn up and down your backlight. I recommend having it turned up all the way as long as it’s on power, and that just, it helps kind of blast it through the dust on the new BMW Nav 6s. Those screens are a lot nicer, and you might not need it quite as crazy but on the traditional Garmin Zumo platform and the Nav 5s, I just have it turned up all the way. Then, it gives you the option for your display timeout so it will, when it’s on battery you can select how long before the screen goes dark.
Next item down is going to be traffic, and that’s going to be all using that smartphone link that we’ve kind of bumped into a few times here. The next one is units and time, so current time, it’s the same one that was on that main page we had a shortcut. It does give you time format, so you can do 12 hour, 24 hour or military time. A lot of people refer to it or UTC, which would be Greenwich Mean Time, which could be nice if you were doing a big trip and you wanted to just have all your time, not have time zone shift. I don’t think it’s very practical but it does give you that option.
Next one would be unit, so miles or kilometers. It does give you a position format, so for your coordinates, it gives you a few different options. If you’re manually punching in coordinates or writing them off of that, use whatever formats correct or that you’re using. I prefer degrees, minutes, seconds so with the seconds having the decimal place, but some people use different versions of that, and you can select it.
It also gives you an option for a datum. Unless you know you’re using a different map, if you don’t know what a datum is just keep it as the WGS84. If you are using a map that’s using something else, yeah, I believe it will automatically change it, if not it will be clearly marked that it’s whatever, so whichever datum it is, but the WGS84, if you’re in North America, it’s going to be the one that you want to stay with.
Next one down is going to be language and keyboard, so exactly what it is. You can choose the language that’s spoken to you. If you have it hooked up and getting your turn-by-turn directions and it gives you option for a man or woman and a few, a whole bunch of different languages, you’re going to select the text language, and then, the keyboard type, so earlier on where we have the option to go from the big keys to the standard QWERTY keyboard, you can also set it up for many, many other languages keyboards as well. That’s your options there.
Proximity alert, pretty much it seems like you can set up custom ones for it will yell at you that you’re coming up on something or red-light cameras is the only default one. Then, the device information. It’s going to give you your serial number, your software information, all of that so, but it’s there. It’s not something you normally use. The serial number is generally under the battery door on the bottom of the unit as well but that’s where that is.
All right, and then, we’re going to move on to tracks. This is something that people normally have a lot of questions with and it is definitely that type of navigation that we use for the backcountry discovery routes as well as any of the Touratech rallies or anything off-road that you want to have a completely repeatable thing.
We’ll start off in the track menu. Under that apps, on the first row earlier on, we had that little wheel that said tracks, and we click on it. This is the screen that you’ll get, and then, from this screen, you’ll see both your saved tracks, which are anything that you imported so backcountry discovery route or a trip you planned in Garmin Basecamp, and then, you’ll have your active tracks, which are where you’ve been so the unit, unless you have turned it off is always recording where you’ve been, which is really handy you go and you ride somewhere and you decide that you found a great road or something like that, you can go back and put it in, save it into your computer or you can just erase it later, so it doesn’t hurt to have that information being recorded, and those you can see on the right-hand side of the screen, you have the saved and active tabs.
Going off of the saved one, if you’re on the saved one, and then, you hit that menu in the top left-hand screen. Again, a little menu shortcut. It will give you the options; delete, import, share, and cancel. Delete is an important one where this series of units, you cannot delete tracks through Garmin Basecamp, so you have to delete it on the unit itself, and from here, you hit delete, and you could select all and just clear the whole thing out, so if you’ve done a trip and you’re going to put a new one in, you can just kind of do it in a quick way like that.
Import and share, that’s if you are using the Bluetooth to bounce tracks between units. It is something that’s not as quick as plugging it into the computer and using Garmin Basecamp but sometimes I know I’ve been out on a ride and somebody meets up a couple days into a week-long ride, and there’s a reroute because there’s a fire ahead or something, they can kind of share that information with everyone from there, and when you hit share down below, you can see, you can use a Bluetooth or you can even use the memory card where it will put it in there, then you can import using the same sort of thing. It is nice that it will give you the ability there to share stuff in the field.
Now, going back to just a regular, the main menu there, and displaying saved tracks, and this is going to be what, you’re going to spend most of the time using the tracks doing, you’re going to put them in the unit, you go want to display them so you can navigate with them, so if you select a track, you’ll get this screen here. It will be on the left-hand side, you have that overview map and you get the green line which is the track itself.
This overview map is just that, it’s an overview map, and if I was in that area, the icon for the GPS would pop up there too, and the overview is great because you can go and like any of the other overviews we’ve kind of covered, it lets you know, “All, right, yes, this is the track that I’m looking for. It’s in the right area.” If it is the track that you want, you’re going to hit the little wrench at the corner and it’s going to get you those screens that are going to be on that right-hand side, so show on map, and that’s [inaudible 00:57:37] just like I said [inaudible 00:57:38] shows the track on the main map, and that’s how you’re going to navigate with the track.
You’re going to show it on the map, and then, follow it. If it’s a track you want and you want to go navigate with it, you’re going to show on map, you’re going to click that check [bark 00:57:51] there to have it shown on the map, and then, you’re going to want to set the color, and we go in a little bit more depth on this, and then, navigating with tracks class but you’re going to want something that contrasts well with your map, so if you’re a fan of red and magenta and orange tend to contrast really well. There’s some colors that work better if you’re using the City Navigator road maps versus the Topo maps, so a little bit of experimentation there is good and definitely recommend if you have multiple tracks, if you’re doing a backcountry discovery route and you probably want to take the easy workaround, have the main track one color and then that workaround different so when you come up to that fork in the road you know that, well, I said the easy route is going to be purple so following the red line, I find the purple one, I get on the purple and follow that until I get back to the red line, so that is something, selecting the color is important.
They’re renaming, it’s not something I’ve really done on the unit, but it does give you the option to do that. I strongly recommend against converting a track to a trip because Garmin is going to show you how smart it is by grabbing a handful of points, and then, making you a trip out of that, so it’s not going to be the track that you wanted especially if it’s off-road, so convert to a trip is something that’s kind of a street function that I’ve never heard of anyone even using there, so just don’t do that. A track is going to be the same regardless of the units on, if you convert it to a trip, you’re probably going to ride the highway around the forest that you’re intending to ride in.
Then, delete. It gives you another option to delete it off the unit inside of this as well. It is important too where you have the show on the map when you’re done navigating with the track to come back in, and then, have it hidden on the map or unclick the show on map because you can have a whole bunch of tracks shown on map and you can get yourself confused where you might have just too many lines and if you’re not paying attention, hit a fork and get on a different track than you intended to be on, so good practice if you’re navigating a section of track and you’re done with it, go back and hide it on the map.
Okay, and so, from here, you’ve picked your color, it’s shown on the map, you’re going to go navigate it, you’re going to go back to your main screen, and click on your, the view map button, and it’s just going to be overlaid on to that map so that’s where you’re going to do it. Don’t try to navigate off that preview screen or anything like that, that’s not going to work. You want to be on your main map screen so that’s how you do that.
Then, we’ll just touch on the active tracks here, and not really a lot you’re going to do with them on the unit, but when you select the active tracks, you can go to that menu, you can clear it or you can share them too. If you did have a way that you got somewhere or something like that you could share, but generally the active tracks, if you’re dealing with those, you’re going back later in the computer and saving them in the Garmin Basecamp or you realize it’s, you haven’t gone anywhere that you want to have the track saved or you can go in and clear that travel history, and just free up some space on the unit, so that is that. That covers tracks.
Like I mentioned, we do have, there is a separate class and we do have the video up. It’s a two-parter on navigating with tracks, tips and tricks and we go to a lot of detail on the way to set up your unit to best navigate tracks and a lot more of the terminology and stuff there. That is the Garmin Zumo 396 and 595 GPS immersion class.
If you have any questions, definitely give us a call 1-800-491-2926 or check out the website. We do carry all the GPSes and all of us at Touratech ride and use this stuff too so sometimes just hearing you’re doing it right is all you need but hopefully, you’ll learn something from this and have a great day.
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