- A turn saying to turn onto a 'Trail', when in fact I'm turning on to a relatively major street that is on the map.
- If I'm off course for too long, the Edge will quietly give up on TBT directions even when I rejoin the course. This can generally be cured by ending course following and then restarting the course, but this is a lot of delicate touchscreen tapping when you're moving in a group ride.
- A moderately perverse route that doubled back on itself at one point seem to cause the Edge 820 to simply give up on TBT from that point onward; not even restarting the route helped.
- The TBT directions just deciding to redirect me off the route onto something else. Often the 'something else' is very wrong, like when the Edge wanted to send me sideways down an alleyway instead of continuing on the street as the route had plotted, or when it wanted me to turn onto a 'Trail' that didn't exist. When I decline to follow the directions, this can lead the Edge to decide I'm off course and give up on TBT directions even though I'm riding the actual set route.
(This isn't consistent, either. I recently did two group rides on two successive days that went along the same segment. On the first day, the Edge 820 tried to redirect me off the route; on the second day, it was happy to turn at the route's official turn.)
- Turn alerts that are actively dangerous and misleading. At several straight-through 4-way intersections I've had the Edge 820 alert for a 90-degree right or left turn when even its map display thought there was only a little jog to one side in the route (and in reality it was straight through). Had I blindly followed the alerts I would have been instantly off course, often turning on to busy roads.
I've had this happen with both RWGPS routes (tcx and gpx) and with routes from Garmin Connect itself, all with (only) the normal Garmin maps. I've seen all of this happen on simple commute rides here in downtown Toronto, which ought to be a well-mapped area (we're not in the US, but it's not like we're obscure). Using an OSM map doesn't seem to make any real improvement in the situation (and using the OSM map alone is a total failure, the Edge 820 seems to really dislike that).
I did enough searching and reading before buying the Edge 820 that I knew that the Garmin Edge series in general wasn't exactly perfect as far as TBT directions went, but this feels excessive (and dangerous). Are these the kind of things that other people are seeing with Edge 820s, or am I having a relatively uniquely bad experience with TBT directions here? Also, are some or many of these things long-standing issues with Garmin Edge units and thus unlikely to be fixed in firmware updates, or do they sound like new problems that might be fixed in the future?
(I cynically assume that if Garmin has had a particular issue over multiple Edge models for years, they're not going to be fixing it this time around either.)
Relatedly, are there any known good (or standard) workarounds for these sorts of issues, like route shapes to avoid, things to do if you know you're going off course, settings to absolutely avoid (I already have all of the recommended RWGPS Garmin Edge navigation settings set), or ways to recover (beyond 'stop the course then reload it')? I'm already having RWGPS include cue sheet entries in the routes I pull from it and checking them, but that's a bandaid.
Since I bought the Edge 820 primarily for navigation, this is really bumming me out. It's a nice unit when it works, but it doesn't work robustly or reliably enough to completely replace paper cue sheets on my group rides (especially if I'm leading the ride and absolutely should not be making navigation mistakes).
