Might pick up a used Garmin for PPDS in a few weeks for days 2-3.

But I have no idea which model I need.

Basically I want to input a GPX then be able to follow it on screen.

Which ones do that ?

The 810 may be out of price range… but if that’s the only option, i’ll have to see what I can do.

What about a used 705? That’s what I have and it works well.

Look at the difference between .gpx and .tcx. I personally prefer .tcx. The auto routing part of the Garmin is a bit carp!.tcx, you follow waypoints as opposed to letting the Garmin try and navigate you to the best of its ability.

The 800. The 500 will do it but it’s only a line with an arrow. The 800 is the best for mapping unless you need something that tells you when you’re about to enter a strava-like segment. Which is probably a bad sign for you personally as well as dangerous as it will make you forget reality and take ridiculous risks to “post a time.”

I just lost an 800 on the mtb and went and bought another straight away. Can’t have a better advertisement than that. or consider a touring if you don’t care about hr/cadence etc and just want mapping.

HR/Cadence are irrelevant to me. Just the mapping/route facility wanted. Ideally with or with the ability to be handlebar mounted of course.

I think you can do that with the cheaper touring models. You lose HR / Cadence but you’re not bothered then it’s fine. They’ve not been out long though so you may not find one second hand.

+1 the garmin touring … 🙂

seems to be several Tourings on Ebay… 🙂

But CRC have the Edge 800 for £220

http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/garmin-edge-800/rp-prod55544

How about a Garmin Etrex HCx?

Etrex HCx

I’ve upgraded to a version that uses OS maps. You’ll need to add a bike mount – around £10. Yours for £45 delivered. PM if you are interested.

Marko

Edge 500 has serious firmware issues when it comes to following a gpx, definitely go for something like the 800.

So, I’ve not used the 800 but my experience of Edge models (200 and 605) is that they’re great training aids, Strava recorders, or for reviewing or sharing a route you’ve ridden but hopeless for following a pre-planned route. The Edge Touring may be different but it still seems to have some very specific, and odd, functionality as core with follow a track seemingly incidental (‘give me a circular route of X km’ for example)

If you want to follow a pre-plotted route I suspect you’re still better off with a Garmin ‘navigator’ rather than ‘cycling’ GPS. I’ve got an Etrex 20 I use alongside an Edge 200 for when I need to follow a route and it works well. Can use Ordnance Survey or OpenSource maps. Runs on a couple of AA batteries so easy to keep running on long rides (though battery life off Hybrio rechargables is more than enough for an all day ride). Still seems to lack some of the (useful) functionality of the older units (reversing a track or ‘trackback’ seems to be missing). Cheap too – a little over £100 plus maps.

The 705 with (free)opensource mapping works well enough.

Thanks for the tips and ideas guys.

If you want mapping and you’re nor too fussed about the heart rate/cadence features then consider an Etrex or a Dakota.

I have a dakota 20. It will do what you want and has a bunch of other good features. Handlebar mounts available. You can also load open source maps ITIY.

You can follow tracks via on screen map or pointer.

Hmmm a Dakota 20 can be picked up for £144 new… which is pretty decent money.

I can deffo load GPXs and follow lads yeah ?

What is so bad about navigating on the 605, I got one not long ago and it seems quite simple to me.

Draw a track on basecamp, export to the Garmin, selct it in the saved rides file and it shows the route and the arrow?

Am I missing something?

Garmins *can* work well for routing but it can be a bit of a faff.

If you upload a GPX course, the Garmin can get a bit confused and start creating its own route between each indidual waypoint, which isn’t what you want it to do (usually).

Or you can go to “edit” when you select a route, and just overlay it on the map. This appears to work even when the GPX has its waypoints defined in such a way as to cause the routing problem above.

Or, the best thing to do, is use a TCX file. Then you can see all the upcoming hills on the elevation profile.

http://bikeroutetoaster.com/ is good for creating stuff as it can route along cyclepaths/bridleways and stuff that are marked on opencyclemap (tho this isn’t perfect). Or just create them on Strava now.

What is so bad about navigating on the 605, I got one not long ago and it seems quite simple to me.

…route and the arrow

It might depend what your previous experience and it’s probably over 2 years ago so my memory might be sketchy. It could be I never worked out how to use it properly (but i did fight with it for a while and had a protracted back and forth with Garmin) But I found the screen just a bit too small and low res to show the mapping but the main issue was It didn’t seem possible to get it to guide you along a track with a large number of waypoints without the unit converting it, badly, to a ‘route’ with fewer.

The mail I wrote to Garmin at the time said –

“the manual says on P11 –

..you can navigate any ride saved in history. Select Menu/Where to/Follow History – the edge calculates a route including directions.

You can also navigate a ride uploaded from an external source….a great trail ride… upload the GPX file……Select Navigate.

What actually appears to happen when you select ‘navigate’ is that the device creates a ‘route’ by creating waypoints from the track. However, since the device decides which are the relevant trackpoints and discards the rest the directions it gives are not accurate. Ergo it is not possible to navigate using the device and it is NOT possible to follow a saved ride or a ride uploaded from an external source. I have struggled with this for some time now and contacted Garmin on numerous occasions but have not received any effective help on how to get this to work – I’ve concluded that it simply does not work.
–

This also meant it would get completely confused on any ride which crossed itself (figure of 8).

On mine, when you select a route to follow, it asks if you want to follow it on road or off road. “On road” afaik will autoroute between points. “Off road” will not, and will simply give a bearing and distance to next way point. I don’t really call that “the Garmin can get a bit confused and start creating its own route”.

It also lets you just see the route or track on the map, and pick a colour for the overlay etc. edit: and also happily picks up a route or track mid way, in forward or reverse.

I prefer eTrex. AA batteries is the main reason, so I can get a week of riding/skiing out of it, and know that I can swap batteries mid-ride if necessary.

My thoughts on the various Edge models:

I have a 200. It’s been fine for following pre-planned GPX routes. I relied on it for the entire of an unfamiliar 500km route last year and it worked splendidly; as it has on many other rides, regularly in 200km territory.

The issues with doing this with a 200 are as follows:
– You won’t get advance notice of turns (though you will get an off-course alarm, so if you do miss a turn you’re unlikely to end up more than 100m out of your way)
– You don’t get maps, obviously.
– You don’t get any say in what info it displays on the map screen, and what it displays is a bit rubbish.

The Edge 500 will (by all accounts – I don’t have one) fix the first and third of these provided you construct the file correctly, which means finding an online tool that does so and learning how to use it (try RideWithGPS and/or Bikeroutetoaster). Still no maps, of course. The 510 is quite different and I don’t know much about it, other than it seems to be probably the last one you’d consider if you were leaning towards navigation rather than training.

If you want maps, you’re looking at the 800/810/Touring/1000. I’ve been trying out a Touring Plus this week. To accurately follow a pre-planned route you need to use TCX (see the first bullet point below). For this, I heartily recommend RideWithGPS: it works extremely well, the export produces the right goods, and they are extremely helpful.

But the Touring has a few small flaws for me, including:
– You can’t display the course unless you’re navigating it with turn-by-turn directions. If you can generate a TCX this isn’t such a big deal, but if you only have a GPX to play with, it is a problem, because the device will recalculate the route. You’ll get the GPX shown too, but it’s not hugely clear and you’re likely to not notice when it goes awry.
– You can’t customise the map display (other than a single “detail level” setting which isn’t useful), which means it’s constantly cluttered with irrelevancies like road names.

The 800, by all accounts, addresses both of these issues: tracks can always be displayed on the map in customisable colours, and the map detail appears to be highly configurable. So, my Touring is going back and an 800 is on its way.

FWIW the best prices I found were the Touring Plus at £180 from Amazon, the 800 £220 from CRC/Wiggle, and the 800 Performance and Navigation bundle £262 from Wiggle.

So, if you want to follow GPXs I would recommend:
– the 200 if your budget is tight (and, er, I’ll be selling mine soon 😉 )
– the 500 if you can find one cheap and don’t really need maps
– the 800 (or 810) if you want the most versatile option and best navigation
– the 1000 if you’re loaded

If you’re mainly using GPXs, do not get the Touring. A little perversely, the 200 and – more so – the 500 are better for this.

Whatever you get, be prepared to have to jump through some hoops to achieve an easy life with any Garmin device. It’ll be painful at first – be sure to read lots of internets – but once you’ve identified the right hoops for your own usage, it’ll be pretty painless.

“On road” afaik will autoroute between points. “Off road” will not, and will simply give a bearing and distance to next way point. I don’t really call that “the Garmin can get a bit confused and start creating its own route”.

So, as I say, a few years back. Off road or on road made no difference. Whatever the limits were on route points, they were too low. Classic example was reaching a road at the end of a BW in Wales. The GPS wanted me to go straight across the field opposite but there was no path, obviously I had to go around but had no idea whether it was to the right or left as the GPS had discarded the next however many points that dealt with the kink in the route (which was actually quite a large diversion to get a relatively short distance). Solved with a paper map but that’s not the point of the GPS.

On figure 8 routes it really did just seem to join random points – I had some GPX to Route conversions that were all over the place with the route jumping to a different part of the ride when looked at on the overview.

You can’t display the course unless you’re navigating it with turn-by-turn directions. If you can generate a TCX this isn’t such a big deal, but if you only have a GPX to play with, it is a problem, because the device will recalculate the route

I think this might be the the problem I was having. I’ve got full UK Tracklogs mapping and naturally want to use that to plot my routes (and have an archive). Yes, you could just ‘display GPX track on map) but that doesn’t tell which way to go when you get to a crossing point (try to find some singletrack in a loop in the woods which crosses the same point more than once – not a problem on a track). Compounded by small screen on 605.

GPX is a ‘standard’ – it seems odd that Garmin stopped supporting it properly on some of their devices.

Whatever the limits were on route points, they were too low.

They used to be with ancient devices (used to be like 50 or something, and I had a few routes that were trimmed or split). On anything since the Vista HCx (which is already obsolete), the number of points is relatively huge. I don’t recall the exact number per route, since I’ve not got anywhere near. My typical routes are of the order of 100 route points, so the limit is something like 1000.

Never had any kind of navigation issue like that. It points to the next route point. If you double back or go a different way, or ignore ti to take a shortcut, or turn it off at lunch and forget to turn it back on until an hour later, it picks up the route at the next nearest waypoint.

At least that is exactly what a Vista HCx does.

regarding the course (TCX) vs route (GPX) thing a post or 2 back… you can convert between the 2 in gpsbabel. and indeed all kinds of clever things like track to route conversion with filtering of 1000’s of track points down to 100s of route points.

I use an Edge 810 successfully for trail navigation, using OSM maps. Works well, generally, although I always take a hard copy/print-out of the route I have plotted as a back-up.

They used to be with ancient devices (used to be like 50 or something, and I had a few routes that were trimmed or split). On anything since the Vista HCx …
it picks up the route at the next nearest waypoint.

Yes, works fine on Etrex 20 (successor to the Vista HCx I think) – it’s just the Edge 605 I had trouble with.

There are radically different use cases as well – on road you only need to know which way to go at junctions which are well defined.

Off road a point to point route following a bridleway across a moor is a bit more difficult though you can usually tell where you’ve gone wrong and back track.

Trying to find sneaky singletrack in the woods (where reception could be compromised and the Edge 200 continually bleats ‘off course’ due to the lack of accuracy), with a dense network of paths is a different job again.

Good post, thinking of something similar myself.

Am I right in saying that if you upload a route as a tcx file it will give you turn by turn on the 800?

If you upload as a gpx it wont??

Whats the difference between a txc and gpx? Seems like the tcx is the way to plan and upload?

Please explain 🙂

cheers

TCX is a Garmin course file, which afaik contains other stuff for training?

GPX is a “standard” format for a file that can contain any combinations of… waypoints, routes (which is a linked set of route points), and tracks (which are a linked set of trackpoints)

routes are usually for planning and following – a “low” number of points, eg one at every junction

tracks are usually recorded, or are things like exported Google* autorouted routes with shed loads of points, and can also be followed

in both route and track (and presumably course) cases when you follow it, it’ll also record a new track (and/or course).

edit: Google will actually produce KML, but other online services that do “follow road” on the route planning (Strava?, Endomondo, etc.) will export what they call a route as a track in a GPX file. Either way, GPSBabel tool lets you do a million and one things, one of which is letting you convert between file formats and tracks, courses, routes etc.

I can deffo load GPXs and follow lads yeah ?

The dakota 20 yes. Ive used it loads by pulling a gpx of the web, drop it into a folder on the device. Hit navigate and you’re off.

I preffer the compass pointing method. You just ride with the compass screen and there is a big arrow the points direction. As you cone to turns it starts to swing off a touch in advance. Go wrong and it points backwards or towards the track ( if its parallel for eg). Its not foolproof. Loose the sat and it rools to 30degrees and stays there. Coming to a fork the point can be vauge until youve gone through it.

You need to check the route on a map first really and have that as a backup. I wouldn’t blindly follow it out into the wilds. If youve loaded up a good basemap that would be good. You can alway check the tracknon the map view using topography landmarks etc.

Caveat! Unless they’ve changes the spec.

I found garmin really helpful online. Emailed them a bunch of questions about the top end edge… thinking thats what I needed. Someone from garmin sales called me and said the 20 does all that for much less money. Might be worth an email to them.

“I think this might be the the problem I was having.“

Yes, sounds the same. Generally, stuff (route planning sites and devices alike) seems not to make use of GPX’s wpt element to implement course points, as explicitly supported in TCX. Garmin devices are rather more sympathetic to the latter – unsurprisingly, because it’s Garmin’s own format.

Looks like I might die in the Lakes with 605 then 🙁

“Am I right in saying that
1. if you upload a route as a tcx file it will give you turn by turn on the 800?
2. If you upload as a gpx it wont??
3. Whats the difference between a txc and gpx? Seems like the tcx is the way to plan and upload?“

1. Correct
2. You can either just display it on the map and follow it, or (provided you have routable maps installed) I believe you can choose to do the same as the touring, ie ask it to basically follow it but it’ll recalculate to some greater or lesser extent
3. In practical terms, when it comes to Garmin devices, think of TCX as being able to describe a pre-planned route to a Garmin device in full technicolour detail, and GPX as being able to define a wiggly line that you can follow by eyeball but *not* being able to describe any turns etc that the device can alert you about

Coming to a fork the point can be vauge until youve gone through it.

On my GPX routes, I tend to place a route point just *past* the junction. Sometimes one at, and one beyond, or if really likely to be an issue, may even place one to the side of a trail.

Only once have I been on the ground, and purposefully chosen the wrong fork just to get 100m breadcrumb trail on the map deviating from where I think is the right way.

Have one junction in the forest near here which has like 8 paths, with 3 almost parallel – that’s fun trying to navigate the first time, regardless of map/gps capability 🙂

3. In practical terms, when it comes to Garmin devices, think of TCX as being able to describe a pre-planned route to a Garmin device in full technicolour detail, and GPX as being able to define a wiggly line that you can follow by eyeball but *not* being able to describe any turns etc that the device can alert you about

GPX is a file.

does it contain GPX route or GPX track?

Bez, thanks for the info, very helpful.
I need it simple 🙂

Now would I be best getting a 800 say with both City Navigator pre installed and also 50:1 OS mapping??

Are there any deals out there for getting maps?

Thanks again.

Have a 200, 500 and a new 810.

If you just want to follow a breadcrumb preloaded trail and have an ounce of spatial awareness, the 200 is excellent. It’s now my off-road goto computer.

The 500 is really my computer for racing with HR, Cadence and Power. I don’t load GPX courses on it.

The 810 has a lovely interface, profiles, maps and all the whistles. It is however, too big a lump. Price matched by Evans for £240. It won’t talk to my phone – not that I care. The free maps and navigation are good, once you have configured how it navigates.

I’d really like a 510-sized 820.

The touring should be all you need. But again, it is a lump.

If any one fancies letting me borrow theirs I can do full cash price deposit and a cxase of beer/scotch/whatever on return.

Noticed some slight confusion about tcx / gpx and following routes on the Edge 800. There’s a very helpful guide here that explains all the settings you need to use.

Foolproof course navigation on the Garmin Edge 800.

http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/garmin-edge-touring-gps/rp-prod115868

So, I rekon I’m going to pick up the Garmin Edge touring unless anyone tells me otherwise.

I can pick one up brand new on CRC for £170 with minor discount, but I have a mystery discount to use, so we’ll see how that goes.