I’m trying to figure out how to create a Course for my Garmin Edges (I have a 705 and a 500, FWIW) that I can set a wattage target range as I cross a specific waypoint latitude/longitude rather than creating a workout with steps that say to go X0 distance from a start point with Y0 power, then go X1 distance at Y1 power, etc. As I understand it, BestBikeSplit has a file you can download that does this, and realizing there are two free downloads, there’s still no way I’m paying $99/year to experiment with something I may or may not use. There has to be a way!
Try PowerTaps PowerAgent software. It"s free and I think you can convert rides into course/workout files. I have not done it yet so I can’t say fore sure its what you want
I can help out. If you want a few more downloads to test out let me know I’ll reset your counter. If you want to make one yourself you can do it with a .tcx file (it’s just xml) so you can recreate it. Or you can create a .fit file manually (a bit trickier). Other option is to load a course into ridewithgps and create a custom cue sheet which will create a .tcx for you. It isn’t much different than what we do, we just take the output from the optimization algorithm and problematically do what you would do manually. We understand $99 is a bit to ask for some for a start-up web application but that’s where we are (trying to avoid the mobile race-to-the-bottom trend). In reality it allows us to give good support to our users and line up some hopefully kick ass new features. All that being said shoot me a email anytime and I can walk you though creating one manually.
Also I paid $499 for an 810 and haven’t gotten that to work yet talk about a bad experiment :). In all honesty the 500 does what we call “Power Based Navigation” better than anything else we have tried. Just make sure when you create a course (yourself or with BBS) that the course actually follows the road nicely otherwise your garmin will drop and pick the course back up as you go (it should still work it just gets annoying).
Yes, that’s exactly the issue! The course mode that Garmin has developed rarely works well when using a software mapping application to plan a route you’ve never biked before (i.e. an “away” event) because it’s too far off course most of the time. I don’t know what distance off the breadcrumbs trips the alerts on the various Edges, but it’s a feature I never use because it’s so poorly implemented. If Garmin let you adjust the off-track tolerance, it might be workable, but up around where I live, the nuisance messages are a steady stream.
Oddly enough, after I had a peek at the BBS Power Based Navigation file that I downloaded from BBS in Garmin Training Center, it looks exactly like what I manually created for another course I had, where I named some points key reminder labels! My problem was I was never on course, according to my Edge!
Thanks for the offer of resetting the counter at BBS! Much appreciated, but the honorable thing is to make do, so that’s what I will do! If the time comes my biking elevates to uber- status, I will invest in the service, however for what I do, I honestly cannot justify it.
How does the course navigation with power targets work on the Edge 500? Do you get the annoying too high/too low alerts or do you simply see the target in a separate data field?
It’s a alert that pops up with the power target based on lat long points. Unfortunately there is no data field to keep it on the screen the whole time. Hoping we might be able to do something when Garmin moves connect IQ to the edge and allows access to file data. Until then it will just be a pop up. I also think we expanded the high low target outputs on works to eliminate the constant alerts. I did notice that some of the newer Devices allow you to create workouts based on averages so we may create something like that based on a 10 sec power average, but I need to test to see which devices will support this.
Cool, thanks! I think even with the expanded range you still get plenty of high/low alerts because it’s based on instant power. It there was a way to make it based on 10/30s power or better yet lap power and auto lap on each interval that would be great
