Edge 820 - Is It Suppose to Re-Calculate Your Course When You Go Off?

This is not considered a recalculation.

This is not considered a recalculation.

Hi Alan,

I'm not sure I understand.

Routing back to the existing course happens automatically and there's no option to turn it off?

What happens if you turn "Recalculate" on? Does it not navigate you back to the existing course but rather calculate an entirely new one to the destination?

With recalculation "Off" the Edge will give you instructions on how to get back to the course at the point where you left it. This from my testing is typically, make a U-Turn. The course is unaltered and the Edge will provide you with directions to the end point from wherever you rejoin it along the original route.

Recalculation was really designed to be used when navigating to a destination, where the Edge has control of the route to follow. Much like your car navigation system or phone app.

I'm not sure how these two settings might interact with each other.

I would need to check on what the behavior of the 820 is now, but prior to this new setting being added my belief based on what other models did is that if you allow recalculation ("On") to happen when following a course it would create what it thinks is the best route to the end point based on your navigation settings. This may be very different to course you had planned out.

I don't have time today, but I will test this on Monday and report back how this new feature interacts with the recalculation option.

I rode off road w/ my kids this weekend and downloaded (from Strava) a route my friend ran a few weeks ago with his kids and dropped the .gpx into the "new files" folder. At the trail-head I loaded up the course and followed it for most of the ride. I left the "re-calculate" option on. For the most part the 820 did what it's supposed to do and gave us warning of upcoming turns. At one point however under thick tree cover where the trail wraps back and forth across a steep narrow valley (trails cut very close together - as close as 4 feet at points) I noticed the 820 was processing a route re-calculation. I suspect the poor reception at this point caused the 820 to think I was on a different trail or spot on the trail and triggered it to re-calculate our route.

I didn't bother to take notice of the re-route directions because I knew exactly where we were and where we were going. But I can confirm that the rest of the planned route remained intact. The 820 did not re-route us directly to the car (end point).

I would like to recommend to Garmin that they add some more intelligence to saved routes so that the 820 provides more leeway to your track before concluding you are off your saved route. The same goes for Strava segments. I'm finding the 820 will report I'm off segment and then back on and off again as I'm riding down the trail. The constant beeping is a bit annoying. (I disabled off-segment warnings but this doesn't seem to apply to Strava and doesn't prevent the 820 from re-calculating directions when it incorrectly thinks i'm off course.)

So I did some testing today.

When following a course, recalculation should not change the course. This was something I had seen on some earlier models, but is not on the 820.

The calculation to get you back to the point where you went off course is currently not configurable. It is ignoring the setting of the recalculation option and is setting it to automatic when you are following a course. This something that I suspect will be changed quite quickly to give users control of this feature.

So what happens when you go off course.

It will recalculate a route for you back to where you left the course until you ignore that a couple times, then it will recalculate a route to a point one mile past where you left the course, and if you ignore that one, it will just recalculate a route the nearest point on the course.

It will recalculate a route for you back to where you left the course until you ignore that a couple times, then it will recalculate a route to a point one mile past where you left the course, and if you ignore that one, it will just recalculate a route the nearest point on the course.

Thanks - that is helpful!

So I did some testing today.

The calculation to get you back to the point where you went off course is currently not configurable. It is ignoring the setting of the recalculation option and is setting it to automatic when you are following a course. This something that I suspect will be changed quite quickly to give users control of this feature.

This was back in September 2016. I am also waiting for this change since then. Fast forward to April 2019 and many, many software updates later, and the problem persists: The edge 820 is still ignoring the setting of the recalculation option and is setting it to automatic when you are following a course. And this turns the unit completely useless to follow a course in off road/mountain biking, since there is always some recalculation that goes wrong and the course crashes -- and you lose the "distance to the end" and "distance to the next". Never had this issue with the Edge 800 nor the Edge touring. It is a mystery why Garmin withdraws useful features and replaces them with buggy options.

I'm riding along a pre-planned and saved route that is 100 km away from my starting point on roads that I am unfamiliar with. Suddenly I see that a there is a road closure and I have to take the detour. My Garmin refuses to recalculate and will not continue my course  because it wants me to go back to the point at which I deviated and insists that I continue through the road closure. It refuses to resume my route beyond the closure as it   insists I return to the point where I left the route in order to continue.  I purchased this unit specifically to get me through areas where I was not familiar with and assumed that a navigation company like Garmin would be able to do a simple recalculation if there was a road closure. What is the point of having a guidance computer when it can't  recalculate and resume the route at a later point? Why don't I just write the turns down on my hand....it would work just as well. 

BTW, the date is Sept 2020 and I have the latest Garmin updates on my 820.

I now use a very inexpensive app on my iPhone to get proper guidance with voice announcement for my turns ...and it has no problem working around a course deviation and rejoining the planned course further along. Now my 820 is a just a very expensive speedometer.

Yep.  That's my experience using courses I've downloaded.  It will always try to send me back to the point where I deviated from the course.  However, once I've self-navigated to rejoin the course, it will pick up and continue guidance from that point onward.

It's been a long while since I did this, but I believe if you have the 820 create a course to a destination rather than use a download a course, it will recalculate new course to that destination...but like I said, I haven't tried this in a long while.  This is more like what a car satnav does.