Doug, a belated thanks for this note. I am virtually certain that's what messed me up last year -- that sometimes when I changed the batteries, the memory card was moved out of contact.
I have successfully downloaded all the GPS tracks you have converted, but have a couple more questions.
First, my memory card has 16 gb, is that a lot or a little? Just wondering whether I have to worry about putting too much on there.
And second, maybe more important, it turns out that I now have, for a lot of the route anyway, two sets of similar tracks. I have alansykes' tracks and the ones you converted. I wonder if this is going to mess me up when I go to find a track. Will I see both of them at the same time or will there be a way to see which one I'm using?
And third, a question about starting out in the morning. I think I have been going to "track manager" to find the track I want to have running, but someone told me I should be using the "where to" button. Is there a difference between these two?
Thanks for your patience, Laurie
Let me address the last question first - it really doesn't matter so far as I can tell unless you want to use an archived track. Both ways will get you to a point where you have the option to use the current saved tracks. Where it does make a difference is if you have used the archive option to remove a track from the 'active' list. The only way to see these, as far as I can tell, is using the Track Manager. They don't appear when starting from the Where To function.
You have a relatively large memory card, certainly more than enough for most map distributions. For example, the OpenStreetMap map set for all of Spain is under 500 MB. All the OpenStreetMap sheets for the whole of the states I crossed on Route 66 (IL, MO, KS, OK, TX, NM, AZ, CA) take up less than 1.5 GB. The tracks themselves are minuscule on this order of things - a few hundred KB each. You shouldn't need more than 10 MB for their storage. If you have a couple of sets of different tracks already, you might start getting up around 50 MB - still plenty of room.
While having a lot of mapping information might seem like a good idea, I find that there are performance issues, and my GPS slows down as it works through all the data that is active, particularly if you use map that have a routing layer included. If this is a issue for you, it might be worthwhile disabling the maps sets you don't want to use.
If you feel you will be confused by the various tracks, you might want to add a prefix to the different sets. Eg, you could prefix Alan Sykes tracks with 'AS'. I suggest prefixing the name because on my etrex30, if the name is too long, the end of the name is not normally displayed. It is possible to do this in Basecamp when the GPS is connected. The alternative is to remove one set of tracks entirely.