Switching Route recalculation to OFF does not work

There's an Activity Profile bug in the E1000, which was never fixed & means in certain situations the E1000 uses the Routing Mode settings for Road Cycling, regardless of the Routing Mode set in the Activity Profile used. I was thinking this may have been transferred over to the E1030.

It should not use routing mode at all if you are using a track.

The purpose of the track is to indicate the roads you want to use. If it used the routing mode, the unit would sometimes pick other roads "against your wishes". That would be bad. (If your track uses a highway, it should not pick another road because highways are excluded.)

If you disable "turn guidance", it shouldn't recalculate when you go off course at all. (It shouldn't recalculate if recalculate is disabled either.)

True, But if you are following a course & Recalculation is on then it will recalculate your route according the selected Routing Mode.

I've never rode with turn guidance off & recalculation on so have no idea what the edge does in that scenario should you go off course. I thought, perhaps incorrectly that it would still recalculate, you just wouldn't get the navigation prompts

The problem with the E1000 was that if you are following a downloaded course the edge only every used the recalculation & routing settings in the Road Cycling, Routing Mode. Regardless of the Routing Mode set in the Activity Profile being used.
However if you used the edge to say, navigate to a place, poi etc it used the settings in the Routing Mode in the selected Activity Profile. Why it worked differently for downloaded courses I have no idea!

The easiest way I found to test this was to.

1. Create a course & download it to the E1000
2. Set the Recalculation setting in the Road Cycling Routing Mode to ON
3. Select a different Routing Mode in the Activity Profile you want to use & set the Recalculation setting to OFF
4. Go for a ride, navigating the downloaded course & deliberately go off route by a few 100m
5. Does the edge recalculate the route?

Its a while since I tested it with Garmin & I had a very repeatable set of results. But as far as I know they never sorted it

True, But if you are following a course & Recalculation is on then it will recalculate your route according the selected Routing Mode.

The recalculated route is a new route (it would make sense to use the routing mode for a new route).

I've never rode with turn guidance off & recalculation on so have no idea what the edge does in that scenario should you go off course. I thought, perhaps incorrectly that it would still recalculate, you just wouldn't get the navigation prompts.

That would be weird and confusing. It shouldn't do that.

The problem with the E1000 was that if you are following a downloaded course the edge only every used the recalculation & routing settings in the Road Cycling, Routing Mode. Regardless of the Routing Mode set in the Activity Profile being used.

This isn't the problem the OP is talking about.

The recalculated route is a new route (it would make sense to use the routing mode for a new route).


That would be weird and confusing. It shouldn't do that.


This isn't the problem the OP is talking about.

Hi. I know that the issue I was experiencing was not error the OP was seeing thanks. The OP did however post that even though he'd switched recalculation to off, the course was still attempting to recalculate . I just wanted to raise the possibility that the routing mode setting issue that exists in the E1000 may also have made its way into in the E1030. Hence my initial question to the OP

I was optimistic that "hotdogpartysausage" was onto something in the above post so Set the "Activity Profile" to road cycling and the "Routing Mode" to road cycling as well and then ran some tests. Unfortunately this does not solve the problem and it still attempts to recalculate the route when recalculate is set to OFF. I am going to have to live with switching the off-course notifications OFF and keep a close eye on the screen. I hope this will be fixed in a firmware update. Thanks for all the input.

Course recalculation related to "Off Course Warnings" button
"Navigation"~Courses"~Saved Courses"~"Off Course Warnings(turn off)"

After discussion this with GARMIN's product support team for weeks (starting with reset of my device, ...), they gave up and told me to launch an "Idea submission"
This is GARMIN's reply : "As happy as we are to hear from you, it's unlikely that you will hear back from us"
I fail to understand GARMIN does not see that this behaviour makes a Edge 820 completely useless for mountainbiking.

Nevertheless, once again, this is my original request :

Description :
for mountainbiking following a trail, when you can not look at the GPS all the time, when you can not release your hands from the bar, and when route recalculation completely doesn't make sense, the only way to use the GPS in an easy way, is to do following settings :
(1) “Off course warning” On -
-> you get a audio warning to return
(2) “Route Calculation” Off
--> does not make sense to recalculate when you are about 30 meters off the track. you just want to see the map in order to return by yourself, very easy.

HOWEVER, with these settings, the GARMIN Edge 820 (Sw version 8.80) always does a automatic re-calculation, which is completely useless, and on top very annoying, as you do NOT see the full map on the screen.

So, very, very easy request :
When “Route Calculation” is Off, please no recalculation (independant “Off course warning” is On or Off)

Hi eltonp,

have you tried the "Always Display" option? I mean, go to to Navigation -> Courses -> Saved Courses -> "Course Name" -> Settings -> Always Displays

That option allows you to watch your track in the map, simply and only as a line. So, the E1030 doesn't use the navigation mode and neither the recalculation mechanism or off-course warnings. I think this the option you need to develop maps.

King regards.

That is what I use most of the times. I find that very convenient and less disturbing.

Unhappily, this issue with unwanted route recalculation, regardless of switching off every related option, is a quite old issue. I had an Edge 800 and later an Edge Touring Plus that were my joy and that worked flawlessly in mountain biking/off road mode between 2011 and 2016. In September 2016, following a problem with the GPS antena, I decided to buy the brand new Edge 820 (400 Euros at the time!). I experienced the recalculation problem in the very first off road course that I tried to follow -- and, worse than all, the device crashed completely during the recalculation and required an hard reset. This was back in 2016, with firmware version 2.0 or something. Several weeks later, and some software versions later, with the same issue occurring regardless of navigation settings, I reported the issue here on the forum. The reply, by some Garmin "Guru" (I assume someone from Garmin) was that my maps lacked of resolution (!). This "guru" was not even able to make a small effort to understand my problem. Of course the maps do not have resolution, I am mountain biking, off road!!! I want to see maps, but I do not want follow roads.This was something I was able to do for years with good my old Edge 800 and Touring units! It seems that nobody is able to understand what it is required: recalculation off should be recalculation off!! This issue was never solved. Fast forward to April 2019, with Version 11.0, I suffered this same issue once more this very morning: trying to follow a pre-loaded GPX course, with turn guidance off, profile with route recalculation off and mountain biking selected, and the first time that I go off course the unit starts "recalculating" for ever or advises me later to "make a U turn", even if I am again on track. Further to the exasperation of loosing the "distance to end" and "distance to next", one side effect of this forever recalculation is that the device uses much more computing power and the battery becomes depleted much faster. I already asked several times for Garmin to bring back the software guys that brilliantly developed the old generation units. This edge 820 is the most buggy device I ever had and I can not understand how it stands with the same problems three years later. It is no surprise that so much people is switching to other brands.

BTW, I had one more issue today: I noticed that more than once, without my intervention, the unit switched the profile from "mountain bike" to "road biking". No sense. absolutely non sense. As it stands, the unit is completely useless to follow pre-saved off road courses.

Sorry for my heated reaction, but I am tired of reporting this issue.

What is the Recalculation setting set to in your road cycling routing mode. There was a bug in the Edge 1000 that may have transferred over to the Edge1030