Your Garmin help, please

The 810 would lose external power when I hit a bump, beep and give 15s to press a button to stay on. Such a shit system. Idiots.

My 800 does the same, it's really annoying as you have to remember to turn it back down every time.

My 800 (which has generally been reliable) completely froze at the weekend, and in my attempts to turn it off I managed to factory reset it losing my GPX track, which in the middle of Dorset on a 300k was really fucking annoying!

Does anyone know if you can load courses onto the external memory card, or do I just need to buy another unit of some description as a back up?

You should store everything to external SD card.

Replicate the folder structure on the SD and set your unit to use external storage.

Copy GPX files to NewFiles or existing .fit files to the Courses folder and it will use them.

Always check that all your files appear in the Courses list - the 800 has an issue where it will just ignore some files dropped into NewFiles. I've had this happen many times and have to keep copying the missing file(s) until they all appear. Numbering them makes this easier.

As has been said put everything on an external memory card, additional to this I also store the raw gpx files on the card in their own folder. This means that I know where they are and can be re-used if necessary.

I tend to leave the GPX on the PC and keep the processed .fit course files on the SD in another folder. On a long ride with many sections, say PBP, I will just leave the PBP-related .fit course files in the Courses folder. Means I don't have to scroll past a load of irrelevant rides when looking for next bit of the course.

I guess having the GPX there too could prove handy if you can get access to a computer on the road. Might do that as well, although I'm already carrying spare devices.

I got a zendure a2 battery pack recently and seems to be great. Plus does charge-through which I'm hoping will be useful for charging garmin in the day + having battery pack ready for phone charging overnight.

@mustardbeak I've also managed to factory reset a Garmin mid ride (was hungry and distracted). Fortunately had route on card which was fine, but lost lots of other stuff.
Am awaiting delivery of Wahoo after which I'll be glad to never have to deal with Garmins again... The ability to load routes off phone easily should be useful if anything goes wrong.

The ability to load routes off phone easily should be useful if anything goes wrong.

This is the key thing which would tempt me I think

This sounds the ticket, will take a look, up until now my 800 has been ok so not really been forced to think about it before

Mine fucked out 450k into 700k. I was not pleased.

You were pretty good at it...

I gave that a go, but todays ride is dated 2019 and using the fit tool online has not managed to fix the corrupted time data.

What now?

Can I save my profiles and then do a hard reset? Any guidance on how to do this would be hugely appreciated.

I've been getting this a few times recently. I did a hard reset and I still had it a few times.

I emailed Garmin and told them their useless, not just for this reason but others. They're going do make me pay £70 for a new replacement one.

You can do a hard reset via the system menu. I tried to save my activity profiles but it didn't seem to work. I just had to remake them.

You might find that you ride file is on the Garmin also. For me it would just make a weird file incorrectly dated. If I looked on the activities I had the correct file too.

Practice makes perfect.

I'd still get lost on an A-road without a GPS.

You can but it does not always work as advertised, essentially you need to copy a few files off the garmin and then put them back after a reset and replace the newly created files.
https://support.garmin.com/faqSearch/en-US/faq/content/eWswdSH4aC3xrXxmQj7U9A

Probably asked before but... what speed do people have their auto pause set to or not at all? How does changing the pause speed affect your average speed?

Surely zero??

3mph

Cannot quite remember where but being old and slow my Garmin kindly paused for me going uphill somewhere in Yorkshire. Probably would have been quicker walking.

Does that a lot if you use GPS for movement only. With a speed sensor it's better.

So in theory, if you were riding in an urban area with lots of start/stop with lights, traffic etc. this would drop you average speed down quite a bit. You would then set your auto pause to eg. 3mph to allow for the crawling speeds in traffic, does it work like that?

Personally, i turn it off.

Well your average speed is based on moving time. So 3-5mph will in a way allow for 'crawling/walking' speed

Never.

Zero. It's worth using it I think, as otherwise your recorded location may 'wander' when stationary and give you erroneous data (and look untidy on the Strava map. Especially when you forget to manually pause at a lunch stop).

Anyone know of issues after installing aftermarket maps? My 520 seems to occasionally accept and work with maps from bbbike.org but I'm having issues with the device losing data (both rides and the maps) when it's restarted which seems to have coincided with the use of these maps.