skinny-
Cool. I'd still love to not give Garmin any more money but Wahoo needs to get a lot better before I jump ship.
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Based on the last year of moderately long route (but not TCR level) navigation, I definitely feel like I'd be happier using a Wahoo on TCR than a garmin. I've certainly seen far more disastrous things happen with Garmins (ask @coldharbour).
But it totally depends how much re-routing you need to do along the way. If you have your route totally pre-planned and can have a stack of back up GPX files on a phone you could bluetooth to a Wahoo that seems quite reliable. But if you're dealing with a road closure in the middle of the night and there's no data connection I could see that you might be in trouble. Though I guess in this instance google maps saved offline as back up would allow you to manually find a route back on track.
I don't know why Wahoo don't actively work with people doing TCR style rides as a means of then marketing them to audax type riders - I've always felt that if something works for you ultra long distance people then it proves it's suitable for 400-600km type rides. I suppose it's not a huge market compared to the sports one, but any audax facebook group is full of people moaning about garmins and contemplating buying a wahoo.
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hippy
ad441
I'm pretty sure you can switch orientation of map.
Unlike with Garmins I think of Elemnt/Bolt/whatever as being something that only really works in conjunction with phone if you're doing anything beyond recording rides. For any sort of complicated routing or navigation beyond what's within a KM or two, I would always go to the phone app or google maps to look at the route. Which is a big limitation compared to Garmins.
But, unlike Garmins I've found my Bolt to be utterly reliable which outweighs everything else - based on using a Bolt for various audaxes over the last year or so I have had zero issues whatsoever - these days I happily load up 200km+ routes as one track and assume it will always reliably provide me with a line to follow at 3am, which is something I never felt a Garmin was good for.
One slightly confusing thing I only worked out recently is while the arrows on the track your following disappear once you've zoomed out to a certain level, the track still shows up as a slightly bolder line that isn't immediately obvious.
I presume you're consdering using Wahoo for TCR? For me I'd have thought the higher reliability would make it worth it if you have GPX tracks on your phone you can load onto it as backup. But obviously does make you more dependent on phone.