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Mandatory Routes?

Greetings 530 owners. Over the years I have graduated through a Garmin 200, 510 and 520, all fine but essentially dumb (ie non routing) devices. Their dumbness was an asset as I mostly do longish Audax rides (200+ kms) and these are mandatory routes, ie set by the club ride organiser and must be followed (otherwise you get disqualified).

My 520 has been just about perfect but is starting to die, battery not as great as before and elevation & temperature sensors gone and I am looking at what will replace it and so have some questions.

If I give the 530 a Fit/TCX/GPX route is there a setting to stop it thinking it has a better routing (crowd routing or otherwise) and make it follow exactly the set route.
Does the 530 display both its own on device generated turns as well as the "course point" ones within the route, can I turn either off.
The route may have custom course points such as Control stops each 80-90 kms, if I turn off the generated TBT will these still display on the map and "next point" or do I just get a colored route on the map.
The routes can be very long, up to 1200 kms, ridden over 90 hours max, will the 530 keep going over this sort of time (with external batteries) and how long would such a route take to "calculate
'on the divice?
I see comments on some forums saying the battery life of the 530 is very good (I used to get 20 hours on my 520), what is the expected real life battery assuming say no backlight and only cadence / speed sensors and no phone connection.

I will probably have other questions but thanks for considering these.

0 dpawlyk over 4 years ago

The units you had don't use maps.

The units that are "numerically" larger than 520 (such as the 520+, 530, 8xx, 1xxx models) and the Touring/Explore models all use maps. These all work (more or less) the same way.

For all of the units that use maps.

1- You can turn off "recalculation".

2- They can display "course points" and "turn guidance" (turn instructions that the unit calculates based on the loaded track; what you are calling "generated TBT"). You can use one or the other or both (or none). Turn guidance is calculated by "walking" the track and seeing what roads on the installed map the track appears to follow.

3- The units will display all the course points (the Touring doesn't support course points; not sure about the Explore units).

4- Not sure about this. You might consider copying split routes to the unit. That way, if you have a problem with a really-long route, you can use one of the shorter segments.

5- Not sure. It might not be able to calculate really-long routes. Set it up to calculate before you set-up your bike. This is another reason to split-up long routes. If you have a problem in the middle of the ride, you won't have to wait to calculate the part you've already passed. Keep in mind that the calculation is for "turn guidance", which you can choose not to use (I prefer using it, along with course points).

6- The 530/830/1030 have much better battery life than their predecessors. (You can also plug them into a cheap battery pack, which you'd have to do for such a long ride).

(I used the ancient 800 to do 600k brevets. It had issues recording beyond around 180 miles and I split up the routes. Other than that, it worked fine.)

0 mcalista over 4 years ago

My longest brevet is only 400km, so I can't give personal experience with how it behaves on a 1200.

1. Make sure recalculation is Prompted or Off.

2. Course points and turns are regarded as the same in terms of the "Distance to Next" field.

3. With no phone or backlight, the run times are pretty much as stated (20 hours). Backlight, GLONASS/Gallileo, or some accessories (eg. Varia radar) can increase battery consumption. I find by plugging in an external battery during meal stops, I can keep the device going comfortably indefinitely.

4. File sizes can get very large, and depending on the density of the road network, quite complex for small devices like bike computers. so I would probably break it into 4 routes to be navigated in 1 ride (1 each day). I am probably being overly paranoid, but personally, I would be gutted if my device crashed and failed to record an epic 1200km ride, so better to play it safe.