I use course navigation on Fenix 6 almost weekly to help with navigation during my long trail runs. While it helps a lot to stay on a planned course, there are many things that could be further improved or things that are either confusing or outright misleading.
First of all, I wanted to mention that after my first run with navigation I had to switch turn-by-turn notifications off. With the notifications, that is madness - my watch is constantly buzzing and popping up turn notifications on every sharp bend of trail. That is unusable on many trails that I run on because trails tend to be curvy. But also, without turn notifications, I find that I have to stay on the map screen for most of the time, otherwise it is very easy to miss an real turn. Still, for some of actual turns the watch doesn't even tell you at the bottom of the map screen that there is a turn.
Below are 4 screenshots of situations where I wish the navigation was more helpful or where it was misleading.
1) The watch is telling me the right turn is coming. Well, in fact the course goes straight here and what the watch believes to be the right turn is that sharp bend of the trail further ahead. I did almost turn right in this situation. In fact the trail going to the right is the returning trail. I wish there were some sort of directional arrows shown on the course in this case to make clear which is the intended direction. Other brands like Suunto and Coros do that already. Even 945 LTE supposedly already does that. But, apparently Fenix 7 still doesn't have that fixed.
2) The watch shows that there is a right turn very close - 62 ft ahead, which is 20 meters. Can you see that on the map? Yes, there is a small sharp bend of the trail right before the actual turn left. But the watch didn't tell me about that left turn. If I didn't look at the map screen and relied on turn notification I would have missed the turn. Even with looking at the map screen, this is extremely confusing. To make it clear I was on Tiger Mountain Trail that continues straight but the course goes left on One View Trail.
3) This is somewhat similar to the example before. In this case the watch completely skips the right turn right in front of me and tells me about the left turn following the first turn. I have no idea how Garmin Connect arrived at generating turn directions like that but that is extremely confusing and is another example where relying on turn notification alone would lead to missing the turn.
4) Here is an example where I deviated from the original planned course and took a different trail. Now that I am finally merging back into the planned course, should I turn left or right? No idea. The only way to tell is to stop and zoom the map out far enough to see where I need to go. But zooming out doesn't always help either because the details disappear and it may become hard to tell which way I am facing vs the direction of the trail. It would be very helpful to have directional arrows on the course in this case.
