Pat: Hey, Pat and Matt back for another episode of Shop Talk where today we're taking it out to the trails for a continuation of last episode. Make sure you click down to that link in the description for the kind of pre-ride planning that we talked about last time. In this one, it's all about getting on the trail, getting that group ride going, and seeing what you can do after the ride. Stay tuned for more.
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Setting Up Your Group Ride Profile
Pat: All right, so Matt, first thing we need to do is get a profile set up and a group established. And I think you've already got your Wi-Fi tethering hooked up on this Sportsman, right?
Matt: Yep. We're all set up with our Wi-Fi tethering. So, we can go ahead and get that profile set up.
Pat: All right, let's rock.
Matt: All right, so first things first, we're on our map screen. We're going to tap anywhere on that to get our little map tab up again. So, I bring that up and we're going to go to group ride this time. So, in group ride, this is where you can join groups, create groups. We're going to start by going to profile. Here you can see I gave it my name.
Pat: Yeah, you can put anything in there of your name and you can pick your color. All right. What color are you picking today so I don't get the same one?
Matt: Yeah, let's uh… let's go orange.
Pat: Orange. All right, you're orange. I'll be green.
Creating a New Group Ride
Matt: All right. So, that's set up. We've got my profile set up. Now, the next thing we're going to do is go to "new group." By default, it just gives it your name, but you can name that anything. If you've got a particular adventure you're doing for the weekend, whatever — you can name it how you want. And then there's this "passcode required" option. What that does is it allows you to create a four-digit passcode so that if you're in a busy area, lots of groups showing up, and you don't want other people to be able to join that group without knowing the passcode, you can turn that on and just set an easy four-digit PIN. So, we're just going to leave that off. Hit "create group." And now we've got our group created. You can see this vehicle is the first one that has joined that group.
Pat: All right. Now, the one key thing here that we briefly mentioned, right, is that you already had your tethering hooked up. And the key to that is that if you want to be able to connect both vehicles and people with phones, you want to have that hotspot feature enabled before you create the group. Because that way you can actually pipe through and connect to a phone. In this case, we'll show you guys what that looks like a little later with somebody that stays back at the base camp while the units are out on the trail and moving. So with that, let's jump in the Ranger next.
Joining a Group Ride on Your Vehicle Display
Pat: All right. Next up, let's get this profile going and get this thing connected. So now Matt's one step ahead of me here, but I'm going to join — hit the group ride button. Go to my profile. I got the default here still is "Polaris Rider." So, I'm going to delete that. Type in my name of Pat, and I told him I was going to be green. So, we'll go with the nice bright Kelly green on there. Now I'm going to go down here where it says "Matt's group" and I'm going to join that one. And once I do that, I can close this down. And you'll see on the right here that Matt is stopped, parked 8 feet away from me. So, super close. But if I tap this button right here, it'll actually set him up as my ride leader now.
Group Ride Leader & Zoom Features
Pat: So you can see this icon shows my circle open, his closed, that he's 8 feet away and not moving. So I'm going to tap on the top to kind of minimize that. But there's a couple different zoom features that you can have. So I can zoom to my leader when these are kind of bolded like that. I can kind of take that off, or I can zoom to a whole group if there's more than three people. So where that's nice is if I've got say five people and I'm in the middle and I want to show them all — this is a really nice zoom option. If I just want to show myself up to the leader, this is actually the option that I normally ride with.
All right, so we got Matt all geared up on this Sportsman. He's going to take off, kind of run a lap, and while he's doing that, we're going to jump in this Ranger and kind of watch along as he goes and maybe see if he can send us a couple messages back while he's setting a track up and getting us ready to go. So, Matt, why don't you fire this thing up, hit the trail, and we'll watch along as you go.
Matt: All right.
Starting the Ride
Pat: All right. So, here Matt goes. He's going to have a little bit of fun. We told him he should hit the first obstacle known to us — kind of the up-and-over bridge here. And then as he goes, we're going to have him duck into the woods. I don't know, maybe there — probably actually right over there — to pick up the trail and start heading east. And once he's doing that, we're going to jump in this Ranger and see if we can watch him go.
All right. Now, hopefully you guys can see this screen on camera as well. I'm the little green arrow, and you see that Matt is going about 11 miles an hour. He's a tenth of a mile away, but we don't see his orange dot. So, if I tap on this button and make that bold, it should zoom out and show him as well. So, this right here is zooming to our whole group, which is kind of a cool feature.
Dropping Waypoints During the Ride
Matt: All right. Here we've got a down tree across our trail. So, we're going to add a waypoint for that. Click on edit. Now, we can type in our name. Hit save on that. We can even come in here and change the icon and see if we've got something that makes good sense. Save on that and hit done. Now we see we've got a "down tree" on our map.
Sending Messages During the Ride
Matt: We can even send Pat a message here. So we'll go into messages. We're going to write a message since we're stopped. We're going to send that.
Pat: All right. So, we just got a message from Matt that there's a down tree. Now, if I want, I can respond to him and say — you know, any of these ones are quick to do. Maybe I'll say "need some help" and send that to him.
Matt: There, you can see Pat sent us a message saying "need some help."
Pat: And we'll see if he sends us a message back in a minute or not.
Joining a Group Ride from Your Phone
Pat: And while we're waiting for that message to come in, the other thing we want to do is set up a third phone — not one of these vehicles — so that somebody back at base camp can kind of watch us and see what's going on. So, we've got another phone here that's not mine or Matt's — one of the guys on the team. And we've actually set the profile here to "base camp." And we can see Matt responded back — he's all good. So, we can close that message down and see he's still going down the trail. So, he's still making good progress.
Now, I'm going to go down my list of available names here, and I'm going to look for Matt's group. And here he is way down at the bottom. So, we're going to click into that. We're going to hit "join group" on there. And when I get back to the map on the phone, I can actually see both of the riders. So, I'm Pat — the green here — and Matt's the orange one down here. And you can see that he's still moving around just like he is on the screen there.
Matt: So… now we just sent Pat a message that there's a bridge crossing here. So I'll also drop a waypoint in this spot. And we'll zoom in a little bit. Make sure we get just the right spot. Edit the name of this one. We'll call it "bridge."
Pat: All right. So, it looks like Matt made it back to a bridge. So, that'll be a cool one we'll get to see in a little while. So, we'll send him a note back and say, you know, "send it."
Matt: Pat sends a message back saying "send it."
Pat: All right, Matt, nice work. We saw a couple messages from you as you were going. We were able to connect up one of the other guys' phones, so we've got a third party that — you probably saw "base camp" show up on your own screen there.
Matt: Yep.
Pat: So, I'm going to jump in with this and this way we can follow you and kind of see what you're seeing along the trail as well.
Matt: Sounds good.
Pat: All right. Well, early spring in the season here. Looks like we got a little trail maintenance we'll have to do. Couple of timbers down in the trail, but overall it's kind of nice here.
Oh wow, that's a real big down tree. Holy cow. I think that's the one he sent us last time he was out. Yeah, we'll definitely have to deal with that with somebody with a bigger saw than what we got right now.
You guys notice out in front of us that we really can't see Matt at all right now. He has advanced far enough on this trail that we can't actually see him line of sight right now.
Finding Your Group & Catching Up
Pat: But the beauty of this group ride technology is if we follow the trail, we're eventually going to catch up to him as we go.
All right, we got some down trees here. Better not hit them too hard.
Oh, there he is. All right, we caught up to Matt just in time for watching him hit the rocks. So, this is definitely a low-gear opportunity here.
Gosh, what a nice day riding through the woods. Sun's shining. 40°.
All right, we're sending Matt some notes to come back to the bridge. We'll see if he's actually paying attention to us or if he's just enjoying the ride today.
Man. Dancing pretty good on the old Sportsman today, huh?
Matt: Oh, yeah. It's doing a good job.
Pat: That's fantastic. Well, this bridge is one of my favorite features of this property — the old suspension bridge, right? Only good for these 60-inch and narrower machines. So, it's kind of fun when you got a Ranger and a Sportsman. We can dance right through it. All right, let's go for it.
All right, now as Matt drives away, the nice part is we get to see his dot going, and we can leisurely go across this thing at kind of a nice gentle pace. It's a really cool bridge. It's kind of fun to ride over, but it's one of those things you want to take it slow on.
Post-Ride Recap & 3D Flyover
Pat: All right, so hey, we just got done doing some riding. Thanks for coming out today. Now, what happens after the ride?
Matt: Well, what's really neat about the RIDE COMMAND system, once you have that ride on the vehicle and it's been saved to your profile, you get a post-ride report. So, you can see how far you went, view that on the map, and you get a really cool 3D flyover. So, you can share that, you can add photos to it, then send it all to your buddies that didn't get to go and make them a little jealous.
Key Takeaways & Wrap-Up
Pat: Nice. So, we showed people a lot of different stuff today, right? How to set up your profile, how to create a group, how to join a group — both from a vehicle and a phone. We showed setting some waypoints, sending some messages back and forth. Overall had a great day out on the trails. Is there anything else I'm forgetting about here?
Matt: That really covers it. A lot of really cool things to help people just have a safe and confident ride.
Pat: Awesome. Hey, that's it for this episode of Shop Talk. Make sure you guys like, comment, subscribe. Let us know what you want to see next time.
