Why is it so hard to follow a self-crossing course?

This is a part of my today's MTB course, pre-planned in connect. I was passing this point multiple times, arriving from either the the 9 or the 7 o'clock uphills and then following one of the downhills in the 11, 2 or 3 o'clock direction.

In some situations the turn cues worked quite well but in some others (as shown here) not at all.

In the situation on the screenshot I arrived the turning point via 7 o´clock. Seeing what I saw below, how would anyone know which direction to take next?

My conclusion was like, hm, no turn cue, so it's probably straight (the 2 o'clock direction). So I went down until I got the off-course warning and had to push a nice 35% climb back up again.
By try and error I figured then that the 3 c´clock direction was the right one (as I got no off-course warning this time).

I really wonder why Garmin does not improve this, it would be so easy. And better, they already have a way to draw directions a lot more clearly.
If you do any map based routing, e.g. to a POI, one gets the nice little white arrow showing you exactly where to go next.

Why is this not also used for following courses? It make situations as my today's one so much smoother!

  • Demo by "Paint" edit.

    What you think about next suggestion ?

    Marker tool  "to next target track section".

  • Hey, sorry for the late answer. But that pretty much looks like how I would wish it would work for Garmin devices. Means it looks good!

  • Few more examples of Garmins navigation "capabilities".

    So the method to figure out where the heck to go is to follow any random direction not yet tried, see if the off-course warning fires after 100m downhill or so. In case, turn and push the bike back up. If not, wow, that was the right decision.

    They just can´t tell me that anyone with a say in anything over there is using their own products for navigation...

  • Suunto has done this right for course navigation - they use a different color for the course segment directly ahead, and place a few directional arrows. I'd be happy if Garmin has done the same:

  • Reviving this thread - can't believe this still isn't fixed or implemented by Garmin? Suunto's solution looks great. 

    It drives me insane while mountain biking that this watch doesn't have this simple functionality?

    Feels like whoever designs this at Garmin doesn't actually ever use these watches in practical situations?

    Anyways, I used to use an app on my apple watch called "workoutdoors", which was developed by one person I think. That app absolutely nails gpx/tcx navigation. The course has arrows overlaid on the route you are taking AND the color of the route varies based on gradient of the trail. It is 1000x easier for mountain biking to read that. Which is insane to me considering this should be super basic for Garmin to do this.

  • I have Locus Map in smartphone and Locus App in Garmin but the problem is that you have to launch Lucus App ad an activity and not as a data field :( I cannot use Locus App as an activity because I need all the other Garmin native functionalities...

  • Unfortunately this is why Garmin take navigation features form old watches without map and put it into Fenix 5 Plus,  Fenix 6 and 945. 

     The already have a navigation more useful into Garmin Edge Devices, they only need to decide to use it instead of old navigation from watches software. 

    This approach is giving us a lot of issues also about custom course point from Garmin Connect. It is impossible to use them now :( You can search a lot of discussions about "distance to next waypoint" or similar. 

  • In my opinion Suunto has done it quite well in devices that they released in the last couple of years:

    1) A small segment of the course directly ahead of the current position has a different, higher contrast color. 

    2) The same segment of the course that is directly ahead also shows a few (2-3) directional arrows. That makes it obvious which way you need to go. 

  • Exactly! how is this not on every Garmin watch?? It is so simple.

  • Used my watch for the first time for mtb trail navigation, and off course got lost on overlapping/intersecting tracks.

    Just about anything would make this easier to follow, arrows on track, bleaching, coloring, dashinng, .etc.

    Pretty horrible implementation