Route Setup

Route Setup is important for both competition flying, triangle flying and planned XC flying. For XC flying you can use routes to steer you around controlled airspace and generally keep you on a planned course.

In your setup menu, there is Route setup. Creating a new route gives you access to any stored waypoints you have existing in your GPSs memory. From that list you can choose (one at a time) the waypoints you wish to add to your Route.

Creating a route during a competition allows you to compare the distance your GPS tells you you have to fly to complete the course and compare it to the official task course to ensure you have the proper course planned on your GPS. There are often tonnes of waypoints given to you at the beginning of a competition so you don't have to manually enter more waypoints later on during the event that it can be confusing which turnpoints you are using - it'd obviously be disastrous to navigate to the wrong turnpoint.

Waypoint Transition - in the Garmin 76 series of GPSs (as well as some of the eTrex's) you can set your 'waypoint transition'. Access this while in your list of routes page by clicking on the 'Menu' button and choose 'Setup Routes'. The AUTO setting will automatically switch your navigation to the next targeted turnpoint in your ROUTE once you have attained the current targeted turnpoint. While this seems desirable, it isn't. The reason is, is that your GPS has no ability to know how close to the turnpoint you need to be to 'get' that turnpoint. Even if you set proximity alarms for a turnpoint, it doesn't help. The problem arises if you get 'close' (a relative term to the GPS) to a turnpoint and start to thermal....your GPS sees that while thermalling, you have turned away from the targeted turnpoint and assumes you have gotten close enough to it and switches your navigation to the next turnpoint in your route. So if you aren't watching your instruments to see if you actually got within 400m of the turnpoint, you'll be unsure if you got that turnpoint and now your GPS has switched to the next turnpoint - it's a pain to navigate back to that last turnpoint....to much button pressing and a major loss of concentration.

The solution is to set your Waypoint Transition to MANUAL and use PROXIMITY ALARMS. When you fly close enough to your targeted turnpoint for your proximity alarm to go off, your GPS will beep to confirm you have recorded a point within the cylinder. What you then have to do to navigate to your next turnpoint is to press the NAV and then the ENTER button.

Pressing the NAV button will bring up a menu with some choices and the highlighted option is to "navigate to next route waypoint". Pressing ENTER confirms that and will switch navigation. A small amount of practice doing this without looking at your GPS makes this task easy. And you don't HAVE to do this immediately at the turnpoint if you know the general direction of the next turnpoint - take your time turning and getting on course before reaching over to your instruments (looking is optional if you've practiced) and pressing these two buttons.