Bikepacking - a viable alternative to racks & panniers

I'm not overly bothered about anything but the navigation either.
My only Garmin experience was with a 705 years ago, and not once did that thing manage to follow a pre-loaded gpx route correctly. Eventually I gave up on it after it changed its purple line to where IT wanted to go instead too many times. :)

I'm hoping they're far more reliable these days, but just can't seem to narrow the choices down to one that ticks all the boxes. I like the size of the 520, but it's supposedly not the best for navigation. The 1000 is supposed to be great for navigation, but seems shit on battery life etc

810 is a significant improvement on the 800. Still mostly shit though.

I was looking at 810s, but they still go for silly money on ebay.

My 800 is great, but there are a few things to remember.

1. Don't record for more than 24 hours, it corrupts, so save the activity, and start fresh. Can combine later with fitfiletools.com
   
2. Turn off auto power off, if it turns itself off, with a large amount of recorded data not yet saved, it corrupts it and requires a factory reset. You lose everything.
   
3. Battery life is way better with vector based maps (OSM, Open Fiets Map etc) than bitmap based OS maps
   
4. It doesn't like going above 45ºC.
   

My 800 will get about 10 hours in map mode, and 12 on normal info screen. Don't think any of the news ones come close to that. I charged it twice a day on the divide, from the dynamo usually, or the cache battery if it was already dark and I was using the light.

It also depends what the route is like. The divide is SO vast, and with so few turns, that mostly I didn't use the map, but I had split to route into 200 mile tcx routes using ridewithgps and added cues to the turns, the 800 can then show you the next cue and how far it is. Was really easy, and also added a cue for the city limits of each town. So I could go to the cue screen and see that Pie Town was 76 miles away etc etc. If you're riding a more technical route or it's in built up areas, you definitely need the map view more.

Cheers Gabes, that's very helpful!

After looking around a bit more, The Wahoo Elemnt Bolt looks really interesting.
So long as the unit follows a programmed route properly I think I can live without the colour screen, and the size, lack of touchscreen, and supposedly great battery life look inviting compared to current Garmins.
Anyone got any experience with them?

Just noticed the regular, slightly bigger Wahoo Elemnt has even better battery life...hmmm

I was going to suggest this in fact, a friend has it and swears by it, but some reviews online are bringing down the 17h declared battery life to 4/5.. I guess it depends on setting and fiddling around with it, for example, turning off wifi and other live updating things might improve the span significantly.

Other than that it looks very well made.

I was under the impression you could power etrex units from USB. You might need to use a non-data cable and it won't charge batteries in the unit but it will power the unit.

My current setup is 1000, phone backup, etrex 30x backup.

800 is not reliable enough with long routes. 810 is a fucking joke, 1000 is the most usable and most stable but has shitter battery life. etrex is good backup unit as it will run off AA batts if your dyno fucks out.

The two 810s I had were fucking shithouse. My 800 has been far better.

I saw one review that at first I read as 5.5hr life, then when I read it properly I realised he said that he'd done a 5.5hr ride and it had only gone from 96% to 55% or something like that.
There seems to be a lot of positive comments on the elemnt from people in the comments section of both the garmin reviews and the wahoo reviews.
Definitely looks good.
I actually really like the 'ugly' looks too that people have commented on. :)

Some peeps used them on TCR so and they're meant to be solid units.
Not as good for on the fly nav but if you're following a preprogrammed route, who cares?
Regular non-shit updates too. If I didn't have so much cash tied up in Garmin shite I'd be using them.

Hmmmm, I didn't know you could power it via USB cable.

It's called functional, not ugly, also, agreed.

I have special adapters that turn any USB cable into a non-data cable.

Good for devices that you don't want to go into mass-storage mode or if you want to charge something at a charging station and don't want your phone hacked...

I'm kind of swinging towards the elemnt now. There seems to be far less negative feedback compared to pretty much all of the more recent garmins.

The newer ones, newer than the 1000, don't have separate SD storage which means when they fuck up (WHEN, not if), a factory reset in the field will lose your tracks and leave you up shit creek.

FWIW I use the 520 for navigation. It's not super detailed maps but if you use the right settings you can get 13 hours battery life navigating. Used to be quite buggy but fairly regular software updates now. Strava-created routes work better than Garmin ones.

I've had my 800 for years now, and will concur with what gabes said about the 24 hour thing. It's let me down twice, the other time was when the calorie counter bit (?) ticked over 10,000. That made it go wibble

Anyone got any experience with them?

Yes, it is awesome.

It's continuingly getting better too, route was not a problem in Spain and France, and the detail in the maps is plentiful.

If you want turn by turn, you need to use RideWithGPS instead of Strava.

Not as good for on the fly nav but if you're following a preprogrammed route, who cares?

Actually you can do this now if you don't mind taking your phone out and draw the route from there.

I've exceeded both 10k calories and 24hrs without issue in 24hr races.

The issue is navigation and has struck me 450k into a ride. The 800 also likes to not take some NewFiles. You have to double check everything you put there has uploaded to the Courses folder because it just skips some.

I do mind.

Cheers guys...I think you're making my mind up here. Granted my last Garmin was bought years ago, but the many bad experiences with it is a good enough reason to try something different. :)