No Turn by Turn Notifications when hiking (walking activity)

First, what the support told you is half the truth. If you do that and switch from curse to map based routing, you might not follow your course any more as intended, but the watch might alter it according to its own computations. So If you want to follow the course as is without any surprises, I recommend to not do that.

Second, the watch doesn't produce any TBT notifications. Either they are already in the .fit file when they get into the watch, or there are none.

So it all depends on the SW creating the track/.fit. E.g. the garmin connects own route planner puts them in the .fit file no matter if you planned the route yourself or had it imported.

PlotAroute I think also creates TBT notifications (not sure if you might need to use the paid version). There is the cue table showing all the TBT cues created which you can review and also edit. Verify that there are some next time before you export the .fit to copy it on your watch.

If you can't get them created in plotaroute just export the track, import it into connect and then sync it via the connect app to the watch via BT.

TabSel said:

with walking/running, you just see the turn arrow on the map track, but no tbt while approaching a turn

I create my routes at plotaroute.com and always get a pre-warning and then the actual tbt in a run or trail activity. I've not done any hiking yet with my 6x, but that was no problem with my 5x. I always take a quick look into my direction list in plotaroute to see if I would like to do some corrections. For some reason, there can be tbt/directions that did not get a turn symbol.

The pre-warning is auto-generated in the watch for each tbt in fit file, so you do not need to enable that in plotaroute download dialogue.

Because I want to run as I plotted the route, I use Routing->Courses = 'Follow course'.
I use Routing->Activity = 'Hiking' even when running.

In my 6x (and in 5x before that), my tbt's have lagged and been 15-30 m late. I've been relying on the pre warnings for turns, but last week, plotaroute released a new feature that can move all tbt's a customized distance before where you plotted them ('shift back' they call it). Great for a lagging devices or if you want them earlier for some other reason.

I tried a bunch of .fit viewers and none was able to display turn cues included in .fit files.

The most straightforward way I found to visualize the whole content of any .fit is to download the fitSDKfrom the ant+ website. In its /java folder you find the FitToCSV.bat which just does what the name suggests.

Import the resulting .csv into excel and filter its lines by the value "course_point" within the "message" column.

These are your TBT points.

And if they are there and you copy the same .fit into the garmin/newfiles folder of your device, the TBT notifications should fire.

But note one more thing: The garmin connect route editor produces TBT cues automatically for any created or imported route. BUT(!) if you export a .fit from the garmin connect website, it will NOT include any course_point fields.

So if you want to review the turn cues created by garmin connect, you first have to sync the track to the device via garmin connect mobile and then examine the .fit file found in the garmin/courses directory on the device.

That doesn't mean that the cues are produced on the device, I am pretty sure the are created on garmin.connect side. Imo it rather means the .fit export function on garmin connect filters the cues before saving the file for whatever stupid reason.