I have an edge 520. It was ok for routes on road bike even if only breadcrumb and turn by turn notices. However, i have bought into the world of gravel with giant revolt and first time out on created route the 520 was giving no turn notices. it was terrible trying to guess via map page. I'm not sure whether it was because. a. i uploaded the route from strava to the Garmin OR b. a firmware update changed settings OR c. once you go on small tracks, gravel, etc the unit just struggles.
Its been a great unit generally and dont want to spend £200 just to get better routing unless it is massively better on singletrack, paths, etc etc as well as road.
Any experiences?
Basically, turn-by-turn is "difficult" when you go off-road. With some mapping it's just about possible. What mapping are you using?
what ever is on strava. i also use garmin connect for routes but it sometimes doesnt like a route that i know is there and reroutes wierdly
Turn by turn can be a bit hit & miss - I think it may come down to which maps you are using.
In Garmin Connect you can add Course Points which are generic messages but you could add turn info at junctions etc.
I think if you copy courses with cuesheet (e.g. TCX, FIT) directly onto the device they should work. You can create them on RideWithGPS.
Yes, it's not really an issue with the device, more with whatever is creating the routes as the turn markers need to be in there for the unit to read I think. Trailforks seems to work fairly well as it's lots of short sections, but obviously it doesn't have all the tracks that you might want to ride.
I will say that the Garmin units (or at least my 530) is pretty awful once I go off course. The display seems to flick around all over the place (trying to be helpful) when I just want it to show me a map so that I can work my way back to the line myself. It also seems to be obsessed with getting me to go back to the exact point where I left the course. Even after I've found it again it often spends ages telling me to do a u-turn. This is tricky though. It's not like a car satnav where you just want the best route from where you are to your destination. Most of my rides are going nowhere anyway, but I want to go nowhere on specific tracks 🙂
^ The Edge Explore has a good sized map display but will have the same problems with turn by turn directions. Some route planning software allows you to set the cuesheet entries with advance notice (say 30 metres) so your unit will beep at you before you hit the turn.
So how do Karoo and Wahoo at off road routing?
I've had no trouble making gravel rides on RideWithGPS and using my 530.
"Turn by turn" is problematic off road because you need the underlying map to not only have the trails that you're trying to follow, but also to correctly understand the priorities at junctions (imagine a junction with a small trail at a turn in a more major trail - taking the small trail is a turn that needs to be notified even if it's actually going straight ahead).
That said, I've done thousands of miles off-road following a GPS, and it works just fine. I tend to plan routes using bikehike, and for the off-road sections, I uncheck "follow road" and trace the route by hand. On the bike, you don't get turn notifications, but you can see the route overlaid on the map and it's easy to follow.
I done this on an Edge 820, and an Edge 800 before that. I've yet to try off road navigation on my shiny new Karoo 2.
I could also mount my iphone and use different software that might work better?
Off-road cycling GPS navigation isn't the same as your car sat-nav, basically you can't turn your brain off and let the unit do everything for you. (There's a strong argument you shouldn't do that in the car either!)
There's a lot of links in the chain: the mapping being used to generate the route has to have all the junction info; the person creating the route has to enable TbT; the route has to be exported as a TCX not a GPX file to keep the TbT details.
The inbuilt maps on the 520 are rubbish. Download some better ones, this video shows how to do it: (assuming you have the 520 not the 520+)
