A few lines to explain the link...

For those of you with a TomTom, whether for the bike or car, you may have noticed it's not easy (read bloody annoying) to plan a route for the bike using the tomtom and avoid all the A-roads to go from place to place using only small, beautiful and twisty roads.

The normal way is to use a plethora of waypoints, save it as an itinerary and away you go. This is actually a great idea, the only problem is that using the tomtom home software on your PC to add waypoints is a complete pain, using sub-menus etc. And using the device itself means that you are continually zooming in, out and messing about with a small touch screen!

So... here's the good bit... (As long as you are online)

Download Google Earth (you can just use google maps if you don't want to install Earth) Google Earth or Google Maps

After installing google earth (if you want to install it) go to TYRE-Trace Your Route Everywhere

Download the TYRE package. Follow the instructions and het presto, you can save it as a tomtom itinerary, garmin route... almost anything really. Create your own POI's.

It all works by copying and pasting the information from google maps/earth into the TYRE program and outputting it as an itinerary file based on the lat and long of the points you place on the map. You have to make sure that the point you start and finish at are lat and longs, not place names. Just move the point a little in google maps/earth when getting directions.

I think it's great as you also get to look at the terrain you will be riding along, as well as seeing what route would be the most enjoyable to/from wherever, instead of the boring old 'fasted' or 'shortest' routes!

Hope some of you guys find it interesting and useful.

Will definitely be trying this! Thanks for the info, could make my tour in france much more interesting

Cheers,

Jon.

Umm, I may be missing something but how is this different from planning the route in mapsource (for garmin, I assume tomtom has similar software?) and then uploading to the device? it will also sync the route with google earth already if thats what you want.

Or does tomtom not come with PC route planning software and this is more relevent to that?

Sorry Finn, you assume wrong with the TomTom idea of planning software. Or at least easy to use software.

TomTom even link to TYRE on their main website as a way to link google maps etc to it.

Ahh fair enough, the garmin one is actually pretty sweet to use for bikes as you can just arbitrarily drag parts of the route on to better roads.

The only problem is that its a bit stupid and re-calculates the route based on the (kinda arbitrary) waypoints. It means that it can sometimes give a different route to the one you see in the software so you have to keep adding enough waypoints for them to match. I guess TYRE would have the same issue though?

Very similar issues. You have to put a couple of waypoints after a turning to prevent doing a u-turn and so on... but from what I can see tomtom have just bought tele-atlas who supply google maps, so the software should be compatible and the routes calculated similar. I shall post a report once I get out on the bike next week and see if the tomtom matches the plan from google.

Might plumb-in the garmin car GPS as well and see which matches the google plan closest.