Route using the wrong cached directions.

Check if your Turn Guidance is actually still enabled as you think as several people said they had the ghost issues with TG but on checking found it had been turned off by a reset or new software version install. @aweatherall above suggests using TG as a workaround as this seems to eliminate the ghost problem for most people but many of us have good reason for not using TG, mostly for longer distance Audax type rides

ps the ghost issue frequently starts with an off course / course found

I confirm that Navigation>Courses>3dots shows Turn Guidance is On.  Thank you for the suggestion.

I have ridden  a few Audax style events  (300km max) so I understand that in these events you must follow the course exactly.  So far in a few hundred miles on the 1040 I haven't seen Turn Guidance want to depart from the course.   

However, I did find that I could not get Turn Guidance to work when using a randonneurs' course that had a coursepoint Turn to mark every turn.  With that course I got no chevrons and no Turn Guidance popups; getting instead tiny icons indicating the turns.   Eventually after examining the  course's .FIT file with FitFileViewer.com and finding it contained many CoursePoint turns, I found the option to disable Course Points (3 dots menu after Loading a course).  With those disabled, I got my chevrons and Turn Guidance back -- but still subject to the problems of off course/ course found/chevrons disappear.   

I don't know what would happen with a course that had just a few course points (e.g.  Control points for a randonneur's ride) instead of having every turn a coursepoint turn.  Turning off coursepoints when they are what tell you where you can stop for food and for documenting your progress would be a bad thing.

Hello everyone,

I hope you don't mind the length of this post, but I want to provide a detailed description of a problem I encountered today with my Garmin Edge 1040. This issue could potentially impact safety.

I have been using the Edge 1040 for approximately two months now and have had a smooth experience with it. However, today, when I attempted to delete some old courses to have a clearer view of the new ones I added, I encountered several problems that persisted throughout my ride.

Firstly, I experienced difficulties initiating the ride. Upon clicking the "ride" button, the ride started momentarily, only to prompt me to start the ride again. I had to repeat this process four times before it finally began properly.

Initially, everything seemed fine as I started on a 40km course with the navigation chevrons displaying correctly. However, the route suddenly recalculated, resulting in the chevrons appearing in reverse, as if I were heading in the opposite direction. The course itself remained the same, including the same side of the road and path. Strangely, whenever I reached a turn point, the device emitted numerous beeping sounds (around 10 times) and displayed the arrow indicating the opposite direction instead of the correct direction.

Despite the chevrons being reversed, other information such as the "distance to destination" and "time to destination" appeared accurate. It was solely the navigation arrows and chevrons that were incorrect. Deciding to continue despite this issue, I rode for approximately 30km when the navigation recalculated again. At this point, the chevrons and turn arrows were correct, but other data became unreliable. The "distance to destination" showed 32km, while the "time to destination" constantly fluctuated between 1 minute and 10 seconds.

During yet another recalculation, both the chevrons and turn arrows disappeared, and only the "time to destination" and "distance to destination" readings were accurate. This is when I noticed multiple pink lines on the display, resembling a "Ghost Course" that I wasn't supposed to follow. This confusion caused me to lose track of the correct route

Naturally, I was quite frustrated at this point, but I found my way back home by relying on my familiarity with a certain part of the course. Upon completing the ride, all the data successfully synced with Garmin Connect.

I have come across some threads suggesting that this issue may be related to the course names, particularly if they share a name with deleted courses. However, in my case, I name my courses with the date of the ride, and today's course was labeled as "20.06.2023," so it couldn't have had the same name as any previous courses.

Given that these problems only arose after deleting old courses, it seems plausible that there is a connection. Unfortunately, I cannot determine the exact cause.

I wanted to report this problem as it not only affects the functionality of the device but also raises potential safety concerns. Firstly, it could mislead users into riding much longer routes than intended, especially when exploring new routes. Moreover, the reversed chevrons may lead individuals to mistakenly ride on the wrong side of the road, potentially resulting in accidents.

Garmin, please have a look into it.

aweatherall said:

Very strange. Let us know if you see that again

11/12 months later it is still occurring also now on the new 840 and recently reports of it occurring while Turn Guidance is enabled on 17.29 (ie not only with turn guidance disabled as it seemed up till then)

The posting below contains 12 threads in the 1040 forum and 2 in the 840 forum that relate to this issue, (many with screenshots / photos illustrating the issues), perhaps you can add it to your current open ticket and ask Garmin development to give it some priority, thanks

forums.garmin.com/.../ghost-course-chevrons-missing-wrong-navigation-instructions-17-29

Regarding shutting down the device in the middle of an activity, I'm interested to know if it stops the activity altogether or if you can resume from where you left off. 

Indeed, the trust in the device becomes compromised when we encounter such navigation issues. It's disconcerting not knowing if the route we are following is accurate, potentially leading us to end up in completely unexpected locations.

I'm also wondering if you encountered the issue with the "Ghost course" that I described in my initial post; or was it just the reversed chevrons?

Did you perform any kind of action with the cache? Or just rebooted the device?

@vini To power down via the user interface, you must first end the current activity.  This is disruptive in that it breaks up your record of your ride.  At the end of the day you'll have two Activities logged (unless you reboot more times and wind up with e.g. four activities logged for a ride, as I have done a few times.)  I am going to experiment next with using Stop Course instead, followed by loading my course, followed by 3 dots menu Route Calculation to clear the cache for this ride, followed by going Back to Courses  and loading it again -- this sequence should not break up the Activity, and it might be a sufficient incantation to recover from the problem. 

Regarding ghost course: At the time that I saw the reversed chevrons, I was riding a very familiar local route (just practicing using the device) so as soon as I saw the device had gone crazy with reversed chevrons I did not look very closely at what else it was telling me.  There may or may not have been pink ghost courses.  To date in all my rides with chevrons disappearing I have not yet seen a pink ghost course.

Regarding deleting courses:  What is your method of doing so?  Did you do it through the device's UI or did you backdoor delete them with the Edge device mounted as another computer's USB storage?

Daoud1990 @Vini regarding the reversing chevrons. Was this an out & back route ie same road used in both directions or a loop. If I have an out & back route the chevrons (when they actually appear) initially (sometimes) only show in the first direction (detecting the direction of travel?) and later at the turn around appear in the other direction (or sometimes display both for a section before & after turnaround? (Its a bit random at times, seems to depend on the route length and how far away the turn around is in relation to that length?), I haven't experimented enough to be sure, sometimes I get chevrons showing in both directions for the entire route.

So the problem with reversing chevrons might be due to the off course / course found and the garmin not knowing the direction of travel?

@Daoud1990  Thank you for the update. It's disappointing to hear that the activity will be disrupted and split into multiple parts upon rebooting the device. I was really looking forward to maintaining continuity and keeping everything within a single activity.

@L.Rouge, the course I took was actually circular, as depicted in the image below. Initially, I embarked on one road and was supposed to return via a different road. Although I understand that chevrons can be interpreted in both directions when the route is out and back, this is not the case for me.
Typically, I use Komoot to create my routes, which provides a clear indication of the course direction. The issue I encountered seemed to arise around the location marked by the red circle. Thus, it is impossible for me to have traversed another section of the same course.

Moreover, the other metrics such as "time to destination" were accurately counting down as expected. If the navigation system had truly been guiding me back home, I would have expected the "distance to destination" to increase as I was traveling in the opposite direction.

At the yellow circle in the image, I encountered a situation where multiple pink lines appeared, leaving me uncertain about which one to follow. I became a bit lost and had to come to a stop and had to zoom out of the map to determine the correct route I was supposed to take. After the recalculation took place in that particular section, I noticed that all the chevrons disappeared entirely, and the navigation functionality ceased to work altogether.

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Edit: Could not upload the screenshot, have no idea why.

My recollection of my episode of reversed chevrons is not as clear as I'd like.  I made no contemporaneous notes or videos and it was a while back, so this is not rock solid data.  I'd say I'm 95% confident that the route I was on was entirely a loop with no retracing anywhere on the loop, and 99% confident that the section where I saw the reversed chevrons was not a section that gets ridden in the opposite direction later in the ride. 

I vaguely recall thinking at the time of the incident, when trying to make sense of it, "I rode this segment in that direction [indicated by the reversed chevrons] yesterday" but that could be a false constructed memory.