atwl77

A bit late on this, but thought I'd chime in on the 1030.

All this while I've been using a 1030, but knowing Garmin's reputation, also had a 520 as backup in case something happened to the 1030. The 1030 is set to record the entire ride (i.e. hit start at the beginning, and only hit stop and save once I complete), while on the 520 I'd start and stop a new ride at every control. But on last month's 300k I decided to go full 1030 and left the 520 at home, because it had been reliable all this while and never let me down (touch wood).

Speaking of battery life, I completed my 300k in 15h 31m and my battery was down to 27%. So in theory this would extrapolate to around 20h battery life, and the 40h with external pack is probably accurate as well. This was with minimal battery-saving tricks. The only thing I did to save battery was to have a relatively minimal main page (just speed, cadence, distance and heart rate), and only swipe to other pages as necessary to read certain information and then change back to the main one. No power saver mode, 1s interval recordings, so I imagine with those additional tricks battery life would be somewhat longer.

The big screen is really nice if you need to read things on it. For me, that's the cue sheet. That's the next most frequent page that I would swipe to, in order to check where is the next turn, control or POI (I like to mark down POIs like controls, petrol stations, convenience stores, coffee shops, etc on the course). I rarely check the map, but if I need to that's just one page from the cue sheet page which I might want to check on complicated intersections just to make sure I'm going to make the correct turn.