I have the
810 with microSD-City Navigator NT, I confess it sends me around the bend as much as it navigates me around one! The main issue for me is Garmin Connect course planning, it's not cycling specific, sharing routing with runners.
I bought my 810 primarily to enjoy plotting (one of the best bits on a cold wet winter evening planning a tour-ride), then following that plotted route, with that route backed up on my smartphone, reassuring on a two week tour. Sadly that means plotting a route on Garmin Connect. I live in a London Suburb and the Garmin Connnect repeatedly navigates the wrong way down one way streets and roundabouts, when I do finally get a route planned I normally lose turn by turn navigation after about 10 miles! The latter is less of an issue as I am happy to follow a highlighted route without TBT; infact I would like to be able to select that as an option on occasion as I dare say it would reduce battery usage plus often I don't need TBT. At RRP £479.99 (as it was at the time, I bought it when it first came out) including mapping I expected GC route planning and the 810 to be far far better than it is to be honest.
GC route planning should be cycling specific, no excuses, it should be; they offer that on
Garmin Basecamp so I can't see why they can't/don't on Garmin Connect. This is especially frustrating as Garmin promote the fact that you can sync and store the courses on your Smartphone. The trouble is that requires the courses to actually be on GC, seeing as everyone I know doesn't use GC course planning, then that is a next to useless feature, that we as the consumer have invested in, only for it to not work anywhere near as well as it should.
So what is the best way to add a route? Well we all have our favourites,
www.mapmyride.com,
www.bikeroutetoaster.com,
www.bikehike.co.uk,
www.ridewithgps.com and
www.gpsies.com are all quite popular and all have their quirks. Personally if it's a quiet country side course with few roundabouts then I will still use Garmin Connect to create a course then sync that to the 810 via my smartphone app, handy if I haven't got the USB lead, which is often the case if as I have a 100 mile commute, which I drive, but will often put the bike in the back of the car and do a quick loop somewhere on the way home.
I don't like Garmin Connect for urban riding though as although you can select 'Google Maps' you can't zoom in far enough to see the indicated one way streets and I've learned that effectively going 'off course' often confuses the 810, it can then lose TBT Navigation, both arrows and text, the latter freezing where it stopped working. For urban riding I prefer
www.mapmyride.com and
www.ridewithgps.com then exporting adding via the' new files folder', both enable easy editing either during composition or once created, plus you can toggle between walking-cycling-driving, which can be handy if you want to walk over a footbridge for example. Those two are my choices, I normally use
www.ridewithgps.com purely because the file name seems to upload better the 810,
www.mapmyride.com course names seem to get scrambled when I view them on the device, although the course itself is OK.
If you want to import a course into GC that you created on another site, which is done via the 'Activities' page, it can be problematic, you will see the import normally fails even though the exported file from that site appears to be correct, GC seems to reject it. However there is a site called
www.gpsies.com that will convert the data to what Garmin Connect will accept for the manual upload. So, via their
'Convert' page you 'choose' the '.gpx' file you've exported and saved from another site, select 'convert' to a 'GPX Track', when converted this will then load into Garmin Connect; (via the import link on the 'Activities' page) note it uploads it as an 'Activity' that you then save as a 'Course'. Note as you will read below this can still be problematic as it sometimes doesn't upload as you have planned, so proofread the route before using to make sure it's been uploaded exactly as created.
Not that the smartphone apps seem to be syncing great at the moment, many, myself included have had 'sync' failures when trying to upload a route. I deleted app and re installed via Googleplay on phone and it didn't work, so I unistalled again, cleaned phoned with
CCleaner, then reinstalled app via Garmin site by syncing laptop with phone; works now....