Your Garmin help, please

Alright.

I love my Garmin.

The key to it, is to make your own routes and to spend the time being diligent about putting in the bare minimum of turn by turn waypoints, turning off all recalculation or virtual partners, and only leaving on the "off-route" alarm.

In that mode... it wasn't an annoyance at all on the Dunwich ride. Barely knew it was on, and it only told me about the stuff I needed to know.

And this is the day that I stop downloading random routes from the internet and start making them all myself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waEC-8GFTP4

Good news.

Guess my issue could be fixed by removing the SD card maps but I wanted the supposedly better maps.

I used the etrex this morning and it gives turn-by-turn which is neat but I'm not sure how I'd go following a purple line for 4000k without the beeping. I'd have to keep looking at the unit to make sure I don't miss a turn.

Anyone want a nearly new Garmin 520 for £150? Best internet price is £189.99

Boxes, mounts and warranty all present!

Does it beep? Sure tones aren't just turned off?

I deleted the standard maps off teh device and use my SD card with the EU map on SD card, work fine.

Anyone got any experience with a Wahoo Elemnt? Given all of the Garmin grumbles on this thread (and it seems to have good reviews) I thought it might be a winner, but any direct experiences would be good. Apparently it now has turn by turn (which is the main reason I want a GPS)...

On the etrex i find it easier using the direction arrow as opposed to the map. i.e it should always be pointing in the direction you need to go.

Apparently it now has turn by turn (which is the main reason I want a GPS)...

I just came back from 950km of plastic touring from Cph -Vienna and one of the other riders used his Elemnt for turn-by-turn.
It worked very fine, but sound of unit is very low compared to Garmin (500) which I used for the same purpose (950 km turn-by-turn).

Yeah it beeps but that's when i told it to take me to (postcode).

What I mean is, that I'm not sure it will beep and give turn by turn directions when I've got it set to follow a route. Does it do that? If so and it proved reliable then I could ditch the P2m and the Garmin Edge units.

@Thuekr - cheers for the heads up! I don't have the best hearing, but I suppose it depends how much I am likely to check the unit or rely on bleeps. Good sign if it works well functionally though

Yeah should do mate. Should be same as 1000 when route loaded onto it. Test it.

Won't be any more reliable than 1000. Just different.

That doesn't help at junctions though does it? It only points the direction of the final checkpoint/destination and there's no way I'm marking a waypoint or turn on every junction in 4000k.

I was always under the impression the etrex were more reliable. I guess maybe that's more to do with using AA batts. I'll load a local route onto it and see what it's like. I've done it on an audax before and I managed but I had both devices running. I could go triple threat and have my phone telling me to turn too :)

Had a bit of Garmin hassle on the Dunwich Dynamo. Paused my 510 at about 55 miles in, screen backlight switched off and I tapped screen to turn it back on, except that I actually tapped 'Save'. My bad.

Started a new ride with the intention of stitching the .gpx files together at the end or whatever. Did another 17 miles and stopped for food. Paused the ride then switched the Garmin off, switched it back on and those 17 miles had disappeared. Sigh.

Started another ride and that worked fine until I got to the beach. Bit annoyed with it though, should it not resume a paused ride once shut down and restarted? I'm sure it has done previously?

Yes it should pick up the ride where it left off (the Edge 20/25 are the first ones I've found that don't do this - but even they don't lose the data, they just end/save the ride).

It does help at junctions as it point to the next via point and not the end point, and as I am sure you are aware most gpx tracks contain hundreds if not thousand of via/track points.

Seem to have lost my Garmin 500 somewhere in between getting changed at work and looking for it at the end of the day.

Assuming that it doesn't turn up tomorrow, what's the most reliable of the current range?

Could be interested if my one doesn't turn up at work tomorrow.

Is the 520 one of the ones which works most of the time?

Does it drain the battery a bit using the compass?

Cannot say I have noticed a great deal of difference as opposed to using the map , if anything I would say it is less power hungry than when using the map but the difference is small and may be due to other factors.

With regard to batteries having used some eneloop pro rechargeables for a few weeks I am very impressed with the battery life. After a six hour hike the battery indicator is still showing full I used the compass pointer for this.

Compasses cost virtually nothing in terms of power, the chips are cheap their signal is easy to read. Usually they're not even read constantly, an accelerometer is read to constantly adjust the compass which avoids even asking the fractionally slower chip. The accelerometer is essentially free to call. The compass is only queried periodically to ensure that the accelerometer hasn't caused any drift in value.

All-in-all... compasses cost nothing.

Having the screen powered... costs almost everything.

Ah, ok so it doesn't just aim at the final point of the gpx, that makes more sense.

Basically to preserve battery, it's best to use the compass all the time.

That'll help, I usually have the maps on display with the screen brightness turn off, as I can be a little paranoid about missing a turn on a route I don't really know.

Well I presume it's still going to use the GPS to know where you are so that it can point the arrow at the next place. Otherwise it's going to be hard to navigate anything that isn't a long straight line.

I'm not sure it will beep and give turn by turn directions when I've got it set to follow a route

On my eTrex Touch there are two types of route it can do

• GPX track
  
• GPX route
  
  

The GPX route will do turn by turn with beeps for turnings and textual descriptions etc., but seems to basically be a sequence of points and the eTrex is responsible for routing between them and generating the direction cues. Great if it gets it right, super annoying if it doesn't. Also because it engages the routing engine, I found it a bit slow.

The GPX track is just a line on the map, as you've drawn it. If you save waypoints as well as the track then you'll get told what the next waypoint is etc which you can sort of use as a homebrew turn by turn nav. Also the waypoints just get added to the general device catalogue of waypoints so if you have overlapping routes it just gets messy and I have no idea how it knows which waypoints to tell you about when you're riding.

I think TCX courses might be a sort of combination of the above, but the eTrex doesn't do those.

ridewithgps has various options for export and the one that I found worked best was "GPX track" with "Include cues as waypoints" ticked. YMMV.