Making sure Garmin routes my Komoot route exactly as made

As per

So how did the 1040 perform on your epic ride, would be a good deal longer / more difficult than most of us will do so your experience with it is very valuable. Any hints for others planning looong rides like this.

The 1040 did perform good, but in the Czech republic I had serious issues with freezing, and had to do a restart tens of times. I narrowed it down to that I could successfully navigate a given route, but if I started actually *recording* it froze if I did much with the maps. A factory reset didn't help either.

When getting out of the Czech republic I thought of turning off the multiband GPS thing. After that, I haven't had a freeze.

In addition to the multiband, I also noticed that my phone coverage was extremely spotty, with my iPhone indicating full 4G, but messages and push notifications coming in batches. This did not happen after I got outy of the Czech rep, and my theory is that either the missing internet connection or the multiband made the 1040 freeze.

Not the original poster but I did just complete TCR in 14 days with the Garmin 1040 Solar. Here are my thoughts and feedback and context as yes, not many people will use their Garmin for this kind of extreme use case :-)

First off in general I saved each ride when I stopped for the night. The longest was 480km/23 hours on the first day, the shortest 127km/6 hours (trying to find hospitals for Rabies shots after a dog bite). No issues with file saving. I also know that Ulrich (6th place finisher) recorded the whole race as just one ride of 4,200km, with no issues.

Length of route. I had the course broken up into 6 courses on my Garmin of between 290 and 1200km. In general this was fine although two of those courses stopped doing turn by turn a few hundred km before the end. I suspect this was due to the 10,000 point limit. Would be so much better if the Garmin calculated turn by turn say just in time, i.e. 200km ahead and then continued to build the route as it went. However it was easy to cut down the routes in Komoot, then have them pushed over to the Garmin from Garmin Connect. Until there is a fix for that I'll keep my routes to < 600km to avoid this issue.

Challenges:

Interestingly I had exactly the same issue in the Czech Republic with the Garmin crashing. After a few restarts I found that if I loaded the course, told it to navigate to the. beginning, then started recording and riding the route as intended then eventually it sorted itself out. This specific issue only happened in that one location. Be interested to know if it was the same location that Ketilwaa was in. I had it going through Slany. My device was not in multi band so I don't think it was a multiband issue. I generally left multi band on at various points and didn't have a problem. I think this was specific to the location as mentioned in the release notes for the recent beta versions of the firmware.

In general the device doesn't like it when you go off-route with a long course loaded. It would often freeze up for a bit then get going again. Not the same crash as above but still enough to freeze it for 30-60s.

Climb Pro did often finish a 100m before the end of a climb, not really a problem just an interesting observation. The GPS positioning was always accurate so I believe this was just the way it interprets the DEM data.

Also if you left the climb pro screen on it seemed to chew through battery very quickly. Leaving the screen on for the Umbrail and Gavia it drained 30% battery power in 9 hours when I'd expect it to have drained about 15% in that time. Nothing else had the same effect on battery life.

The unit would often not stay off at night sometimes and you'd find it drained a bit of battery overnight. I'm going to turn on auto sleep to see if this addresses the issue.

I had auto dim display on. Whilst the display would light up for food or drink notifications it didn't light up for turn notifications which was very frustrating. I'd have to hold the screen to get it to light up when it beeped at night for a turn. Leaving the display on does get through battery faster.

Pros:

Ultimately this is a fantastic device. I wish I'd had it 3-4 weeks earlier so I could have tweaked the settings before the start of the race but by the time I'd got to Eastern Europe I had it pretty well dialled in. 

Battery life is just insanely good. 3 days riding between charges if necessary. On the super long days (18-19 hours riding time) I was getting through 35% battery life. This for me is the most important aspect for ultra racing as you just don't worry about charge levels. If you are in a hotel every 2 or 3 days then keeping it at the right charge is easy. During the sunny days when the Solar panels were generating you are burning about 1% an hour. Amazing. Yes the reporting of time gained makes no sense at all but you can see it just not draining.

USB C charginge at 15 watts is another game changer. If you do need to push some charge in then on a 45 minute stop for food you can get enough in to last at least a day. Saved me when I discovered the climb pro issue.

Route calculation is just fast. Faster than my old 1030 Plus. Pushing routes from Garmin Connect mid ride is also excellent.

In summary, the hardware is best in class, the firmware needs some work but already some of my key issues look like they have been addressed. Sometimes it sucks being an early adopter but as an ultra coach who does 4 races a year I'm always going to be that :-) I didn't regret taking this over the 1030 Plus. Give it a few more firmware cycles and it will be the best device for this kind of riding.

Any more specific questions on it or the TCR then fire away. If you want to see all my daily video feeds from the race then they are all on Instagram. Username is @boardclaw 

Niel_Copeland

what Fw did you had?

ketilwaa  Niel_Copeland   

Thanks greatly to you both, your efforts are a few orders of magnitude above what most of us will attempt, Garmin should give you both some sponsorship. I am planning (more dreaming maybe) for a PBP next year which will be a walk (ride) in the park in comparison. I picked up my 1040 today, just the non-solar as I am fairly confident (based on 40+hrs from my current 530) that I can push the 1040 to 100 hrs, I am fairly undemanding of the device but your comments are encouraging as your usage would be more on the heavy side. The current betas say they include fixes for freezes in some European locations so maybe you saw that, if someone knows the specific locations Garmin has recognised that would be helpful. Happy & safe riding.

little offtopic:

do I absolutely need a premium version of Komoot, whether premium or not, the route loaded on the Edge always remains the same, or is Premium also supported on the Komoot app on the Edge himself, si there a difference?

Pretty sure I was on the 12.16 firmware for the race.

I did have some issues close to me in the UK, not freezing but constantly pinging as off-course when I wasn't. Going to try and go there and test.

More than happy if Garmin want to sponsor me  Next up is Atlas Mountain Race for me so that will give a new set of challenges.