Navigating back to a course after going off course.

My 820 has nearly ended up in a hedge on more than one occasion. If you dont start where it wants you to start on the same route, it will try to get you back to the start by make a u turn prompts, and I am talking metres, so you set off, 1/3 mile down the road it says make uturn, no ill keep going , you will realise soon I am on the same course, i only missed a yard at the starting point right ? Wrong, 1/2 mile down the road, make a uturn. STFU Garmin !!!!! and pick up where I am stupid. Garmin Connect made a circular route for me at the weekend, 15 miles into it took me up a small road that stopped at a muddy track only a tractor would navigate. I turned back the 1/4 mile and continued on the main road and followed road signs totally despondent at Garmin doing its best to Uturn me back to the dead end. It actually stopped reporting remaining distance after a while, 30 mins later I hit upon part of the regular course and it resumed from there as if by magic, course found popped up. I was unfamiliar with the route and relied totally on the Garmin. Its good when it works, but very annoyingly quirky with some remarkable old school algorithms when things dont quite go to plan. Howabout an option to reroute when there is a road closure or bad routing. rather than take you back to the last expected point on the route to resume from there in an infinite and futile loop. If this was google maps on a smart phone, it would have realised I skipped the road I could not travel up and rerouted immediately to get me back on track further up the road. I hope the 830/530's are now less laggy than the 20's because sometime you are on top of a junction before it pipes up and tells you which way to go. It can also be fine. Its a very frustrating device sometimes but i wouldn't be without it ! 

You are right, they have always been antiquated from the car GPS systems to the Bike GPS units, where mobile phones have perfected the touch LCD screen a decade ago, Garmin still has a prod and hope screen, I could understand it if they were cheap chinese WISH knockoff devices but they are top dollar premium devices. Not good enough, hope later devices than the '820's and that generation have come into the 21st century.

I too am driven mad trying to navigate with the bloody 820, exactly like the posters above. Unfortunately, I don't know if the competition is any better. I fly behind a Garmin aviation GPS called an GNS430, and I understand why that is antiquated because it takes a lot time and money to certify safety-of-life devices. But a cycle GPS? I've had to double up on long routes by mounting both the 820 and a phone with Google Maps just so I don't get both lost and furious. But if a challenger brand comes up with something better, I'm off!

Ride with GPS recommends the following settings:

https://ridewithgps.com/help/garmin-edge-1030

1. Click the Settings Icon at the bottom of the home screen
2. Select Activity Profiles then select your preferred profile (Train in my case)
3. Select Navigation, then select Routing
4. Set Routing Mode to Road Cycling
5. Set Calculation Method to Minimize Distance (though Minimize Time shouldn’t be too different)
6. Ensure Lock On Road is set to Off
7. Select Avoidance Setup and make sure all options are disabled. Since we are loading pre-planned routes onto the Edge, we don’t want it recalculating the route on us if it thinks there may be a toll, highway etc.
8. Set Recalculation to Prompted or Disabled. If you lose GPS signal, or go slightly off course for a block or two, with recalculation enabled the Garmin has a tendency to shortcut you to the end of your ride with whatever it feels is the quickest way. This is almost always not what you want! By setting it to prompted, you can choose to recalculate or not.

Important to note that the course recalculation navigates you back to the start if you off course not back to the course. This can be triggered if you lose GPS signal. I think the Wahoo has similar functionality although it shows on the map how to get back to course.

I set up two activity profiles, one for courses I know, one for courses I don't.. For courses I know, I turn off the re-routing and navigation entirely. For courses I know I turn on navigation but leave off recaculation as it's pretty much worthless. Before I was riding with cue sheets and Ride With GPS with volume on in my jersey pocket. I'm not sure the 530 is any better.

Did you find a fix for this as its really annoying 

Turn recalculation off.

I have the same problem with my edge 530. The navigate back to course is useless. One time it had me do a u-turn only to tell me to do another u-turn after I did the first one. If I had followed its directions I would have been in an infinite loop of u-turns. 

And, related, if you load a nearby course, and you want to pick it up (not from the start) and just follow it, it constantly wants to return you to the course start, and is useless for following the course at that point.