iTrod

I recently completed two 400K brevets of about 252 miles. I followed a TCX file route during the ride. At the end of each ride, the unit simply shut off rather than give me the option to save the ride. When I turned it back on, the ride was lost/not recorded. Has anyone had similar experiences with the GARMIN Edge 810? I have plenty of memory available on the card so I don't think that is an issue. I guess I could save the ride in segments, but prefer to have a record of the ride as a whole. Please let me know if anyone has a fix for this.

Steve B.

Drew has reported this and his solution was to break up the route into shorter segments, ride, save, start new, etc...

I'm certain he'll see the post and chime in, hopefully with advise as to what's a useful distance for ea. route.

Other then that, how the 810 working otherwise ?. Lots of reports of it being a very flaky unit. I've been using mine since April this year and other then some hiccups early, have had a steady set of tracks and pre made courses followed with no issues. Thus I do every ride expecting it's going to crash again, but it never does. I actually had a great track with it yesterday, a mt. bike ride entirely in the woods with heavy tree coverage. The unit never seemed to lose the track, even tough I know deep woods are tough on GPS units.

Drew Eckhardt 

They do that. The 800 is more stable - I didn't make it a week without losing data on the 810 I bought before it - but also has problems with long rides. The 500 seems better but doesn't have maps.

You'd be wise to split your route into multiple .tcx courses, treat each as a separate ride, reboot between segments, and join them afterwards using fittools.com , gotoes.org, or ridewithgps.com.

That mostly works - those tools do not adjust the elapsed distance on the added files, so some software can act weird on distance based displays - Golden Cheetah overlays the graphs with distance on the X axis, but is correct with time. Imports to strava and ridewithgps are OK.

I used that kludge because my 800 crashed on its first long ride after 140 miles and forgot all the data samples back to when I turned it on and off at 20. That ride was already split up into 4 courses suggesting it's more than just course length.

It was getting flaky (turn guidance popups not disappearing on their own) at 70 miles so I'm trying 50-60 miles rounded to the nearest water stop / city limit.

I think the Wahoo ELEMNT should work well enough by 2017. They have <CoursePoint> support for .tcx files now, so you get turn alerts but no next point field or distance to next point. Maps lack street names, cycling routes are invisible zoomed out, and they don't pan. They don't generate turns like the Garmins do where a direction was elided.

Some people are happy enough with it now.

iTrod

My 810 tends to be glitchy. It gets worse when attached to an external battery which is generally necessary due to the length of my rides. Once the battery goes to 100% charge, it wants to shut off. It randomly stops giving cues at times, which I learned that I can fix by reloading the route. For the price, I would expect a more reliable GPS unit. Unfortunately, Garmin is the heavyweight in the field of bicycle GPS, so we have to accept what they provide.

seajaye

I use the 500 but have run into similar problems on rides of 300k+, even with splitting routes into smaller segments. The problem for me was tryin to record the whole ride as one.

My solution (which worked flawlessly on a 600k) was to break up the route into segments, and then every 200k or so, save ride/reset to 0. Stitch files together later and voila!

Mark Thomas has some great tips on how to get your Garmin to work for you; it was in one of the recent AR issues but might also be found somewhere on his blog (I can't find it after a very half-hearted search).

Steve B.

This ?.

Mark's Rando Notes

dwmckee

I have one that does something similar. I bought it for century rides and it locks up (and loses all data) on rides over about 70 miles... I exchanged it twice at REI assuming it was defective but even this third one seems to go bonkers on a longer ride. Basically useless for my riding. Thinking about selling it...