Fed up with Garmin device limits

Understand everyone's issue here. Simple solution for Garmin is to build and sell a flash drive you can plug into charge port. Or better yet, I can go buy a usb c to usb female adapter from Amazon for 10 bucks and use a usb drive i already have. Make menu screen so you can download to flash drive routes you want to keep and from that menu selection allow device to be able to retrieve and then use that off loaded route. Doing this keep data you want easily accessible without dumping more files onto your phone, laptop, or desktop. This also eliminates using Garmin Connect. If it is easy to find a route on the 1040 and delete it, then offloading to a flash drive should be easy to do as well.

I don’t think that scrolling through a thousand courses would be something many people would want to do on a 530.

Most courses are already on some website somewhere.

It doesn’t seem that there are that many people impacted by the current course limitation.

no need for anything external, the unit has huge memory already - in fact i have a directory in it with hundreds of my routes, i just move them in or out when i travel to another state or country.

it is a dumb artificial limitation legacy of when the 4 bit processor and the small memory imposed limitsvon number of routes, tracks, waypoints etc.  nowadays there is no hard reason for them, but also no reason for garmin to remove the limitation, they wouldn't sell much more, in their view.

as fsr as scrolling through thousands of courses, people would use what already exists, a search function.  no one scrolls through billions of web pages on the internet. they search.

my current "best in class" way to create routes and get it to the edge 1040 is ridewithgps to curate it in detail and simply "pin" it there - it automagically shows up in the 1040 WITH FULL NAME. My prior method, the RWGP connect iq, truncated the name severely, as did some tcx or gpx file upload methods - sll in the name of some DOS level compatibility.

btw i hope everyone understands we are just wasting our ideas or bitching about its shortcomings among ourselves here.  no garmin presence nor participation.  don't set your expectations too high.   :-)

jrc_ said:

no need for anything external, the unit has huge memory already - in fact i have a directory in it with hundreds of my routes,

The issue isn't the lack of mass storage. The issue has never been that.

jrc_ said:

but also no reason for garmin to remove the limitation, they wouldn't sell much more, in their view.

Sure. I don't think there are many people who care about this feature.

jrc_ said:

as fsr as scrolling through thousands of courses, people would use what already exists, a search function.  no one scrolls through billions of web pages on the internet. they search.

Not relevant. There are hundreds of thousands of very fast (non-local) computers supporting these "billions" of searches.

Entering text on the 530 is not really practical. Entering text on a 1040 still kinds of sucks.

The search on the driving units (where searching is a key feature) sucks. 

I’m trying to understand what the issue is here for routes, personally I don’t even like to have too many routes in the device itself as for me this is a hassle with scrolling through. The way I work is that I have just something like 20 routes on the device, all the rest is in Garmin Connect or Stava anyway. So much easier to scroll through routes on my cellphone and to send them to the 1040. 

The only thing left is to remove old files from the device, yes that could be made easier

some people like potatoes somevprefer tomatoes.

it works great for you, but allow others to prefer to have 500 routes, 1000 tracks, 500 waypoints.  you don't have to fill it.  :-)

Just trying to put in some perspective.

Not trying to stop anybody from filling their device 

Agree with the OP that the limit should be raised and that if it’s being approached a warning should be issued. There should be search/filter options as well, defaulting to nearby routes first. I shouldn’t have to manage my routes on a separate device when the 1040 has enough storage and computing power to do it. 

No one disagrees with you.

But it is very unlikely to ever happen. 

The reality is that you are going to have to deal with how it actually works.

Given that Garmin hasn’t ever gotten around to add a warning, there’s even less chance of seeing the search filter/search options.