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Navigation issues in mid ride with 830

iantravelling
over 3 years ago

I recently bought an 830 ... Am in the Alps to mountain bike and road ride so thought it would be amazing to load routes, and explore without having to buy maps everywhere I go. However I'm finding the limitations of this device are quite exasperating and I end up stopping so many times mid ride to try and resolve"issues" with it. So if anyone can shine any light on ways to solve the following, I would be hugely grateful....

1) I've realised that planning rides on the device itself is pretty pointless, but using Trailforks I don't seem to be able to link various trails together to make a ride. I'm in Les Gets bike park and even though trail forks shows trail directions, if I try and plan a route through a number of trails it sends me the wrong way down trails, tries to join a chairlift half way up.... How do you link individual trails to make a longer mountain bike route?

2) on road rides I've come across the age old "make a u turn*  but the 830 doesn't seem to be able to navigate me back to a route, only back to the start, even if I'm only a hundred metres off the course and parallel to it. Any suggestions

3) if I want to change my route mid ride, maybe add on a loop somewhere, the only way I can figure to do this is to stop, get out my phone, plan a new route, and download this to the unit. However the unit won't sync while there is an activity running, so you have to end your ride, sync the unit to the phone, and start again. I had to do this a couple of times today, one was because a road was closed. All I wanted to do was edit the route I was on, or get back to it further down the road and keep recording. As a result I ended up with three rides and the sets of data, from a single ride. Is there a way I can edit course mid ride without stopping and saving the activity? 

4) I wanted climb Pro for road riding, brilliant to see where you are in a climb, what's coming up and how far to the top of some of these  monster cols... But when I changed my course (see above) mid ride as I had to take a detour, I got no more climb Pro even though it was enabled.. really frustrating. I was on small mountain roads but ones that are regularly used by road riders looking at heat maps.

I've got to admit, I'm a bit underwhelmed by it at the moment. Hopefully someone can shine some light on the above points. Thanks everyone! Ian

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    1) I use Trailforks for researching MTB trails/courses on-line.  If the entire desired course isn't specifically in Trailforks, I lay it out in RideWithGPS or some similar app that has more/better routing options, then download it to my Edge.

    2)  I simply use pan and zoom to see where I am and decide my own route back to the desire course.  Once back on the course, NAV (if using it) will pick up as if you hadn't left it.  In many cases, I don't use NAV while mtbing and simply have the course displayed on the map and follow it that way.

    3) Yep.  You have to do that, or simply look at the map and navigate that way.

    4)  It has to be NAVigating course to know where you're going to be able to predict and show the upcoming climb.  Without being on a course with NAV active, it can't do Climb Pro.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to looigi

    Thanks for the reply. I'm a bit staggered that for an expensive bit of kit you then have to subscribe to Trailforks and to ride with GPS to be able to do any sort of route planning, and the trail forks route planner seems to be a nightmare to navigate your way around a bike park, taking you the wrong way up trails even though you enable the trail direction. Sigh......

    I'm starting to think I could have saved £400 on an 830 MTB bundle and bought a decent smartphone holder, and used apps like ride with GPS and Strava. I'm seriously hoping I'll grow to love my 830 but at the moment I'm not so sure.

    Appreciate the replies. I've spent way too much time trying to work out what this thing can and cannot do.... And sadly the cannots seem to outweigh the cans for basic navigation.

    Cheers, Ian

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to iantravelling

    Agree !.  For that price, you would expect this Garmin Edge 830 to offer 100% of this standard gps feature, but in fact you get only 50%.  From the discussions on this forum, I understand this feature is functional on 1030 (+?), so it shouldn't be a big deal to include this for this 830 device as well.  It would be fair that Garmin would fix this incomplete feature in the next upgrade.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to iantravelling

    You don't have to use RwGPS for route planning.  You can use any route planner that uses OSM maps.  Garmin has one on the Connect website which you have access to for free with your Garmin account.  If you subscribe to Strava you could use theirs.  I personally use RwGPS because I prefer it over others.  I believe you can use the free RwGPS tier to plan routes.

    Turn off recalculation.  It doesn't work as you think it should on the 830.  If you have to go off course it is best just to get yourself back on course where you can where the unit will pick up navigating again.