When the fork in the proper cutlery only has one tine and we're told any more than that is excessive and bloated, I'll take the bloody spork.
Indeed. Last time I gave any money to this godawful company, there was no such thing as the Wahoo Elemnt. Even the Rflkt hadn't been invented yet.
The only realistic alternatives for a while were Bryton and Mio. I did know someone who had a Mio and he was quite the evangelist for it, but I think that's only because he was trying to convince himself. He uses an Edge 1000 these days.
If I were in the market again today, I certainly wouldn't be looking exclusively at Garmin, but I'm in no hurry to upgrade/replace my Edge 510, which still does everything I need it to do very well, despite people constantly trying to tell me otherwise.
My favourite eating utensils are my fingers. Chapati is good too.
Paper maps for you then.
Garmin don't have any real competition unless you don't mind going out on a limb. Their traditional competitors (such as Magellan, Lowrance) don't compete in the leisure market, at least not outside the US. Newer options like Satmap, Bryton, Memory Map, Lezyne etc are just underwhelming. The Wahoo (and possibly Hammerhead) devices seem strange to me because of their phone-dependence, but I think the higher-end Garmin Edge models are heading the same way, so obviously that symbiosis which is unappealing to me makes sense for others.
Won't the rice pudding make them soggy?
...Why bother with the frustration of learning some esoteric new device?
If you already own a spork, why would you splash out on a silver fishknife?
I don't think I'll ever give money to a company who are so mean with their vowels. Tssrs.
I resent the Garmin learning curve. At least the new players are trying to make life easy for their customers (even if they can't spll).
Even though Garmin is so thoroughly incompetent that only historical lack of competition permits its continued survival, most of us have struggled for years with its products and learned an array of tricks and workflows to get around the pointless limitations and arcane complexity.
If you go with another product, all that knowledge is wasted and you have to start from scratch. I'd do that if another product was vastly better and likely to be developed for the next decade, but they all seem to have their own problems when examined closely and I don't trust some of the companies making them.
The least frustrating Garmins are perhaps the eTrex models. They are hideously complex, but they are pretty reliable at showing a line on a north-up map (that's all I care about for navigation; instructions to turn left on Who_cares Street in 100 m, etc., seem pointless to me) and they can run for about 20 hours on two eneloop AA cells including through the night with a dim backlight.
… but it got me there without bother, which is more than the shown Edge 520 would have done without a load of babysitting, battery charging in the middle of the night, etc.
Wahoos are as equally underpowereed as Garmins. As one of their design considerations is battery life. Battery density has not really advanced all that much in the last 15 years, if only there was an equivalent Moore's law for that. Wahoo solved the routing issue on a low power / cpu device by getting the onlne routing web servers to do it (RWGPS). Correct me if I am wrong but Wahoos cannot do on the fly routing without the connected phone app.
You are not wrong, you have to use the phone app to do the routing. But if you have a GPX file, you can just load it up and it works. Even when that file has 15000+ points.
It's a good way of doing it. The majority of people are carrying a super computer in their pockets, so why stick needless complexity into the unit, when you can offload it to the pocket supercomputer most people have. Sure it might not be as good as "you have deviated from your route, recalculating". But it still provides a lot useful info, you have the line you're supposed to be on, you have a basic map. You can then do your own routing back to it.
- Autozoom - Zoom in more when route is fiddlier, and zoom our when it's not.
It's actually an interesting one how ultra racers, and audaxers are good at finding bugs in these devices. Often a bug won't manifest itself for a number of hours, and most "normal" cyclists don't do many rides longer than 3-8 hours. So a bug that only appears at 15 or 20 hours run time just doesn't often show up in testing. But these bugs are surprisingly common in many systems (free the goddamn mallocs()!), and a sod to debug.
No they are not. The phone is not a super computer and the routing is not done on the phone it is done on the RWGPS web servers. The phone just acts as an intermediary to pass the routing data across.
The definition of supercomputer has been updated over the years, but around the turn of the century, a super computer was classified by the US government as being able to do >2000MTOPS (Millions of Theoretical Operations Per Second). As such the Apple G4 computer fell fowl of US export restrictions, being that it did just under 2500MTOPS, these being the same export restrictions that controlled weapons/arms exports. The US government has updated the threshold of MTOPS to be classified as a super computer, but your average smart phone easily does over 2500MTOPS. So by a 18 year old definition, we do carry a super computer in our pocket.
I stand corrected on the pass through to RWGPS servers.
 Also a calculator, take that year 8 maths teacher who said we wouldn't always have a calculator in our pocket!
Super computer performance was (and still is as far as I am aware) defined in terms of floating point operations per second (FLOPS) so not quite sure where you got this TOPS figure from. Even in 2000 super computers were hitting 10 power 12 FLOPS. Tell me, does your phone hit that figure?
Widely off topic as we have strayed.
At the top end they were. At the low end of what was classified as a super computer?
The Apple G4 was classified as a super computer, it had 500Mhz single core cpu. My phone has an octacore cpu at 2ghz, plus a 3d accelerator. Modern phones are as powerful as desktop machines of nearly 20 years ago.
Yes it's an isoteric way of looking at the definitions and it's abusing terms, but it is technically the case.
It is really excessive for the route and distance and a prime example of bloat.
I just downloaded the Race around the Netherlands GPX and the track has 31,814 track points. Far more than necessary. I loaded that into my Etrex 20, and also loaded one filtered down to 10,000 points. The original takes 40 seconds to load before you can click Go to navigate, the filtered version takes 8 seconds to load before you can click Go to navigate. Over 30 extra seconds processing the extra track points it does not need by any stretch of the imagination. If I passed through 30 controls I have already lost 15 minutes just awaiting for the GPS to be ready. Plus it will be slower updating the map.
Does not need the trackpoints? Well I made both tracks visible on the GPS map screen and zoomed right in to see where they deviated. Note the zoom and tell me where you can see the original track (it is red) on the screen grabs? I usually have my GPS set at 200m zoom but zoomed right in to show you there is really is no differece in what you see.
A track with thousands of track points it does not need is wasteful and bit like someone handing me a 100 page A4 manual of directions when I asked how to get to the local shops.
Throwing increasing amounts of power at a problem is not always the answer. I know a company who used to do this and it cost them a million pounds a year in hardware upgrades every single bloody year. Sometimes you have to look at the efficiency of the software and the appropriateness of the data you supply.
For instance here is a trackpoint from the Round Netherlands GPX. Tell me what precsion those lat / lon and elevation are claiming.
Truth is the Round Netherlands track could have been navigated as a single track but not the bloatware they provided.
It is technically the case that in 2018 your phone is not classed as a super computer.
In 2000 US export restrictions limited Internet Explorer to 40 bit SSL encyption. Anything stronger was classed a munitions. Presumably now you will tell us that this is strong encyption or that browsers are munitions in 2018?
I know it was a rhetorical question but I just looked up the answer anyway out of interest. Apparently, 13dp gives you angstrom levels of precision, so 15dp is going to be somewhat more precise than that.
There are two points here that should not be conflated.
You can reduce the precision of the track points, I agree that 15dp is a bit overzealous 5 or 6 dp is plenty, however, the track point you have hilighted has come about due to a poor implementation in some software somewhere, of the IEEE 754 floating point standard. It's common in a lot of computer systems where designers don't know enough about the way their machine is storing the underlying bits. Many programmers look at a problem and think they will use floating point variables. Now they have 1.000000000000002 problems. This is why you can remove bloat from many a GPX, by simply taking all the values for lat/long, and making sure none of them are more than 5 or 6dp, (or even 3 or 4 if you're ok with 20+m of accuracy), this reduces the total number of bytes that the files needs to be stored. This can reduce the amount of CPU used by the device. However, as most programmers will just import the value into a variable, which will be either a 32bit, or in some cases (rare I'd say) 64bit, value, it takes the same amount of memory on the device to store 54.0, 54.123456 or 51.999610000000004, even if the actual file size for 54.0 is 14 bytes smaller. The only time that this longer variable then is slower than the shorter one is when it comes to reading the bytes off of the memory that the file is stored in, at which point you are looking at string manipulation, and saving yourself a couple of dozen or so clock cycles, when each clock cycle is done at many dozens of megahertz at least.
Thus, the precision of the lat/long points used in the gpx file, and the number of track points in the file, are two entirely separate things. I never claimed I needed angstrom level precision, and I hope that the above gives you an adequate explanation of why points like the above come about, and why it really doesn't matter, as well as how that is entirely not the point I am making.
So, having having dealt with that red herring, shall we move on to the issue of number of track points?
How about next time I go out for a longish ride, I upload my gpx file as it comes out of what ever route planner I've used, and one of you lot can reduce it to what ever you think is right, and I'll ride it, and we can see at which point I scream and switch to my original gpx?
 Here, have Mondays ride: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/28119872 it's 1992 track points, 116km, give me a gpx with less than 116 points, and also tell me how long it took you to do it, and I'll see how far I get before it drives me too insane and I use the original route.
You turn your device off at controls?
Right, you reduced it down to 10000. 10000 is still one way point on average every 167m. That seems reasonable. Thing is, the claim made above is that you shouldn't need more than 1 per km, so now take that gpx, and make it no more than 1670 points. Even then, that's more thanthe 250 that an etrex allows in a route. Still.
See previous post for explaining why this is a big red herring.
Right, you reduced it down to 10000. 10000 is still one way point on average every 167m. That seems reasonable. Thing is, the claim made above is that you shouldn't need more than 1 per km, so now take that gpx, and make it no more than 1670 points. Even then, that's more thanthe 250 that an etrex allows in a route.
You are still confusing routes and tracks. With routes, you need much fewer points. And in a route it is unhelpful if you have too many points.
If following a route, I want the GPS to display the "Distance to next". ie this should be the next place I have to turn off. If it says 1 km to the next point, it means I don't have to think about navigation until then, just keep following the road I am on. So it is pointless and confusing to have loads of extra points in between junctions, it just means you get the GPS beeping needlessly.
Right, you reduced it down to 10000. 10000 is still one way point on average every 167m. That seems reasonable. Thing is, the claim made above is that you shouldn't need more than 1 per km, so now take that gpx, and make it no more than 1670 points.
Frankie's claim above was for direct routing and he did not claim the route would follow the road, it won't. But he feels it is enough to navigate with if you place the route points only at turns. Not a method I have tried so cannot comment on how that would go for me. Even back in 2002 I was navigating by following tracks, before I had a mapping GPS.
Of course, why on earth would I leave it on chewing batteries whilst I stop for a bite to eat or to sleep?
It would be like leaving the oven on in between meals. Wasteful and pointless.
So the overall average speed field is correct, presumably.