Edge 530 for hiking also

If you use Komoot, you can either download one free region or buy the world map (which has different routes depending on your discipline for 30euros or the premium for 6euros per month (billed annually) Just got the world maps after having the region maps on my garmin for the summer road riding and thought might as well do some hiking in the winter in the Ardenne and this should work perfectly. 

The distance will be wrong (shorter by 25%) if you use it for hiking. It will also be wrong for mountain biking unless you use a speed sensor. I believe they did this on purpose. However! If you record a hike and then upload it to garmin connect and then export it as a GPX file and then re-import the GPX file to Garmin Connect the distance will then be correct. 

Just tried today, the distance is really to short. Do you know why that is? Gps map looks perfectly fine...

Apparently the software is filtering out low speed gps drift and also low speed movement.  The points it's taking are fine and if you export the file as GPX and then re- import it to Garmin connect the distance will be correct.  I spoke with Garmin about it and they make up all kinds of excuses. They actually said it's not designed for walking.  I said that it's also not designed for mountain biking apparently.  I believe they intentionally programmed this way to prevent us from using it for running or walking.  People have been requesting a fix for this for a while.  They clearly have no intentions if fixing it.  They want another $300 out of us.  

I have created a new profile called "hiking".

All seems okay except that:

- i cannot opt out sensors: heart rate band is okay though not necessary, cadence and speed sensors are of course useless for hiking. Sensors seeem to be system wide, same sensors for all profiles.

- i cannot set a different recording method: in the bicycle i have it every 1 second. For hiking 3-5 meters would be fine, otherwise the resulting track would be a messy skein. But again this seems to be a system wide setting.

This 530 could perfectly be used for "walking" activities if only Garmin gived a bit more choices/flexibility per profile, all profiles are bicycle oriented.

Regards