how to create new course preferably on a laptop, then send it to the Edge

I use plotaroute.com. The route planning tools are a joy to use. The basic functionality is free but for only €24 / $27 per year you get extra services including an automatic transfer of routes to Garmin Connect including the course points you created. That is a lot less than the $80 that ridewithgps costs. 

How about building route/courses/whatever with POIs in them? Not a point as part of the course, but something like a bagel shop or rest area, that would be nice to know about. If I click on it with GC when building a course it becomes part of the course. Are the other products better? Can the 1040 handle POIs anyway?

And what about points that should be used as part of the course, distance to next, etc, like intersections? How do I specify them? I don't need to know how far the next driveway is or however the course is constructed by GC.

One more desire: Garmin Connect does help me make simple courses and once saved it gets to my 1040. I think I have to fire up Garmin Express and then hit sync, but it does get there. It is kind of odd that after the ride, I have to break out the USB cable to connect the 1040 to the laptop and then find the saved ride "fit" file in a folder and copy it over to the laptop to save it. It would be nice if (maybe using my wifi) that courses could go to the 1040 and saved rides could be pulled from the 1040. It seems like too many hoops to jump through to do things.

I'm almost ready to go back to paper maps.

You aren’t being very clear.

I have no idea why you are talking about driveways.

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On the Edges, you have:

• course points.
• locations.
• POIs.

These are items in the Garmin “world”. What other companies call “POIs” tend to be what Garmin calls “locations”.

Course points are part of the course and show up as magenta icons.

Locations are “points of interest” you can add from the device or from a file. These are not part of the course.

POIs are like locations that meant to be fairly permanent. These take more effort to install and, I believe, the 1040 doesn’t support them.

Locations and POIs show up on the map and you can use them as targets to navigate to. They show up in different lists on the device.

Getting what RWGPS calls POIs added as locations is a bit of an effort and is a paid feature anyway.

You should probably learn how to deal with courses first (since that’s the thing that will be most useful to you). 

Ok thanks! I will keep learning and trying. I appreciate your explanations. It does help!

Keep in mind that tens of thousands of people use these devices.

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The Edges can transfer activities to the Garmin Connect website by:

1. BT transfer to the Garmin Connect app on your phone.
2. Through a WiFi connection (generally your home network).
3. By a USB cable to Garmin Express running on a computer. Express will find the activities all by itself.

LINYBob said:

It is kind of odd that after the ride, I have to break out the USB cable to connect the 1040 to the laptop and then find the saved ride "fit" file in a folder and copy it over to the laptop to save it.

This is kind of odd. No one really does this. Are you using Windows or Mac (Macs can be kind of funny)?

I'm not sure what you are doing here. Garmin Express won't look in random places on your computer (where ever you copied the files to on your computer). There is a way of uploading files to the website (but that doesn't use Express) and people don't normally do that.

Winfried said:

including an automatic transfer of routes to Garmin Connect including the course points you created

Directional course points? , that would be good, is this a recent change as there are dozens of posts in both these Garmin forums and the Plotaroute support forum that say GC strips out all (or at least directional) course points, including this from a “Plotaroute Admin”,

”However there is another issue here - Garmin's API doesn't actually support coursepoints with turn arrows, so we're not able to send the directional coursepoints anyway (we're limited to sending "generic" coursepopints that won't display a turn arrow), so it's probably not worth us offering this as an option until Garmin's API can cater for this. ”

Garmin Connect didn't include the direction course points (only the custom ones) when writing the FIT file to units that used maps. (They might have changed this behavior.)

If the Plotaroute (or whatever) course is loaded into Garmin Connect, it should be treated like a course created in Garmin Connect. (If that's the case, I'd expect the behavior described above.)

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If the Garmin API won't let you include the arrow course points, it's likely because Garmin treats the arrow course points as "owned/created" by the routing algorithm. That is, these course points will change if the route gets edited.

RWGPS changes course points too when the route is changed, which means there's a risk of losing your course point changes (custom course points and edits to arrow ones). Maybe, Garmin Connect is better at preserving your custom course points (I doubt it).

RWGPS lets you add arrow course points (along with other types). Garmin Connect doesn't. Garmin Connect has many more of the other types of course points than RWGPS does.

dpawlyk said:

Sounds like the 1040 software needs some work

Yes, not their finest software effort, looks like they rewrote badly a lot of stuff due to the new interface rather than just porting old but working code, the 540/840 got the same.

”Ghost Courses” where Turn Guidance is OFF have been a pain for 12 months, looks like this is fixed in the latest release but that also broke indoor course following and Off course warnings, again if guidance is off, seems like a repeated gap in their testing?

I agree with most of what you say but I don’t find the issue with repeated navigation instructions for roundabouts for example.

What I do get are turns which are actually just bends. Aside from that the 1040 guidance is excellent and way better than the 810, 1000  the 1030+ was ok.

I think all rwgps club members get some premium course editing features?

Overall the background wireless sync using Pinning in rwgps makes getting routes onto the Edge painless and I wouldn’t use any other method.