Custom cues

That's interesting.

No other units (as far as I know) did anything like that. Since Garmin dropped it, maybe it didn't work reliably or it was dropped to add other features.

The 530 is really an 830 without a touchscreen.

The 520 was a 510 that displayed maps. The 520+ was replaced by the 530 fairly quickly.

"Course points" were a way of getting turn instructions on models that didn't support "turn guidance". 

Most of the "turn guidance" models (the Touring didn't; not sure about the Explores) support "course points" but it seems like an afterthought. 

Thanks for describing what I also Experienced.

I am in the same situation, on the 520 tcx/fit file navigation was perfect. I bought the 520+ because I like to have a map in the background for orientation, but I the nice tcx/fit file navigation was gone. 

I can life with only the datafield "CRS PT Dist", but it's useless when everytime an alert jumps in front of the datafield and make it unreadable. 

The forerunner 945 can "navigate" a tcx/fit file without the alert and haves a map. Only downfall is the small size and battery life when navigating.

dpawlyk said:

maybe it didn't work reliably

The problem (for Garmin) was that it worked TOO well (for customers). I prepared maps & routes for club members using 520s in the 2019 Paris-Brest-Paris (1220 kms / 90 hours elapsed limit). Set course points for the check points / feed stations each 50 - 90 kms & a few major climb summits and the riders just followed suitably zoomed map screens for the turns, no-one got lost. I used On-Road format maps from BBBike.org (these are about 10% of the normal map size because they don't have street names or ground cover, but they show the roads, town names, rivers etc) so that they fitted within the limited 520 storage space. Most users reported that as long as they kept the 520 charged via an external battery they ran without crashing for the entire 90 hours while 530s / 830s / 1030s were crashing all around them. Somebody probably got sacked for building something simple that worked with minimal resources and fulfilled the customers needs.

Same experience + it's the only way to get propper navigation when driving offroad routes. 

I know the wahoo bolt v1 was aible to do the same, maybe I have to test the wahoo roam or bolt v2? But I like to stay with Garmin.

L.Rouge said:

Somebody probably got sacked for building something simple that worked with minimal resources and fulfilled the customers needs.

It's more likely that Wahoo and Hammerhead are to blame. With the newer models these companies have, the 520 was too expensive for the features it was offering.

And, while it's an interesting feature, it seems likely that not many customers were using it.

Most customers don't know how there Garmin works to compilcated :-)

Yes. That's a fairly common complaint. That's another reason Garmin doesn't add features (that may be useful to some people).

The more complicated things are, the more expensive the cost to support it is.

Displaying the course points in the text at the top of the map is something that will appear flaky to many users (sometimes, it does "one thing", and, at other times, it will "do another"). Adding more switches to enable/disable stuff also make things look "too complicated".

Gives all the devices the same behaviour would help also. Turn off the "guidance alert" on the edge 530 gives a different result then on the forerunner 945 for example.

Navigation settings under 3 different menus and bad documentation are other examples of making thinks complicated.

Nothing is perfect. It seems the different devices are managed by different groups. Does the 945 behave the same as the Fenix?