cboggia

Hi everyone

I used to live in China, where I stayed a couple of years for the Company I work for. Before leaving ​​​​​to move back to Italy, I bought a Garmin Edge 1000, with local China maps.

The unit itself works flawlessly, now I’ve added some free maps of the area I currently live in, here in northern Italy.

The problem I have is that Garmin Express does not let me add this unit, it says to contact Customer Support; I did, here in Italy, but they say that they can’t help because it’s a Chinese unit and that there might be some restrictions on the settings of the unit and/or on the servers it is contacting, when uploading; they said they’re not even sure of it, in the end they offered me to buy a new unit at a discounted price… which I found being still higher than the one I could get on Amazon ☹ .

I’ve tried on 4 different Windows PCs, Win 7 to 10, both here and while I was still in China, always with the same result

Funny thing is that my older Garmin Edge 200, also bought in China, has no issues with Garmin Express and can be added on whatever PC I install GE onto.

Now the questions:

1. Can anyone help to fix this?

2. Is there any ways that I could “flash” my Chinese unit and make it become a Euro/NA one? Garmin Support says NO, but that’s the official response…

3. Any suggestions/recommendations?

Thanks in advance

njkayaker

There are the Garmin forums. They might be a better place to ask than here.

As far as I know, you can't reflash them to another region.

Why do you want to connect it to Express?

You can load activities to Connect manually.

cboggia

Hi there
I'm in fact trying in multiple places, but I thought here I would have more chances for bike units
It's not just for activities, it's also for SW/FW updates, like it does already without a glitch on my EDGE 200

njkayaker

This place isn't as useful.

The 200 is a different unit. It's less complicated too (it doesn't have maps).

Your issue (in one form or another) comes up fairly frequently.

The Explore/Explore 1000/1000 might be beyond where there will be any updates. The 200 appears to be well beyond support with respect to firmware updates.

There are places (not as convenient as it used to be) to get firmware.

cboggia

Update:
I finally made it to connect my EDGE 1000 China to GE and I was able to upload the activities to Connect.
It was a 2 steps (tricky and undocumented) process, achieved only by trying and trying...

1. the Server that GE should be set to is EXCLUSIVELY the one for China, the others I tried DO NOT WORK.
2. the email address one needs to register the unit to MUST BE one that China "likes", the usual "whatever"@gmail.com DOES NOT WORK; I remembered I still had one "whatever"@qq.com from the local QQ IM app, it worked just fine

I was able then to create a new account and it works ok; the only (extremely annoying) thing is that I have now 2 accounts, one for the EDGE 200 on the "normal" servers with all my history uploaded and a second one exclusively for this EDGE 1000 China model.
I have with no idea on how to merge the two accounts into one (the Chinese one, I'd say) and keep all the past activities, anyone got any help to offer?
Thanks

njkayaker

There is no way.

You can manually upload the activity files. It's easier if you still have the files on the device. Otherwise, you have to export the activities files from the other account.

cboggia

Thanks njkayaker ("nj" as in New Jersey? I used to live nearby there )
It's a start, I'll look into it.
Can it be done in bulk, or is it a (painfully tedious) one-by-one process?

njkayaker

I think you can pick multiple files. I rarely do it. It's easy enough to check.

One reason that is available to be able to load files from non-Garmin devices.