# accurate gps for mtb trails



## bondy1980 (Feb 13, 2015)

Hi all

I am looking for an accurate gps computer for mountain bike trails, is there such a thing? I have looked at the garmin edge 510, anybody use this for trails if so could you post the maps?

Thanks


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## Harold (Dec 23, 2003)

Go find your local trails on Garmin Connect or Strava. Both sites tell which device was used. You'll find a huge variety, and yes, some people do use the 510 on the trails.

What is your definition of an accurate GPS computer? Your question is substantially vague that makes it difficult to give a real answer. You'll get a lot of opinions, which are like you-know-what.


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## Impetus (Aug 10, 2014)

If you're looking for a device to tell you precisely where on earth you are, and save those way points for upload and route construction on a computer at home, any real GPS, including a GPS watch will do that.

If you're looking for a 'Nav' system for your bike, like your car has, then...no not reliably. There are just not enough trails input into GPS software yet. Maybe in a few years, Garmin is trying to integrate that stuff now.


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## heyyall (Nov 10, 2011)

I use a 510 on trails and it works fine. This is a tracing from yesterday's ride. You can see that when I doubled up on some of the trails, the tracings were essentially coincident. And as you may get from my title, it works fine in the cold. 
View attachment 964500


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## dtm2525 (Jan 15, 2015)

A little off topic here but I've got to ask. I Have a terrible sense of direction, I can't understand how anyone who rides into the middle of an unfamiliar forest with no view of the perimeter and no straight trails to follow can ever find their back. Even with a gps, as much as I'd like to have it live tracking me on screen, unless I get off and walk I want to ride at a good pace and that means that little gps dot of me on the screen isn't going to give me enough notice of when I'm supposed to take a left at the fork instead of the right.


Help my out guys! Love mountain biking but the fact that I have to worry about how I'm going to make it out same day is a huge buzz kill.


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## heyyall (Nov 10, 2011)

It depends on where you ride. Marked trails with maps would be a good starter for you. Studying maps with GPS tracings before the ride and checking them along the way is good. You could also do some basic orienteering training (sighting, approximating distance, etc). 

You can use technology as a crutch. For example, Strava lets you trace out or import a route. You can load this route and it will put your location on the map. 

As for that sense of adventure and not knowing what the next turn brings, that is one of my favorite aspects of mountain biking.


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## Harold (Dec 23, 2003)

dtm2525 said:


> A little off topic here but I've got to ask. I Have a terrible sense of direction, I can't understand how anyone who rides into the middle of an unfamiliar forest with no view of the perimeter and no straight trails to follow can ever find their back. Even with a gps, as much as I'd like to have it live tracking me on screen, unless I get off and walk I want to ride at a good pace and that means that little gps dot of me on the screen isn't going to give me enough notice of when I'm supposed to take a left at the fork instead of the right.
> 
> Help my out guys! Love mountain biking but the fact that I have to worry about how I'm going to make it out same day is a huge buzz kill.


Your instincts are quite possibly better than you think. Avoiding the panic is SUPER important.

I didn't realize that I even had an instinct for navigation until a college professor over a decade ago took the class out into the woods and surreptitiously got the whole class turned around entirely off trail in the middle of dense woods nobody was familiar with. Then he told us to find our way out. He was emphasizing the use of our compasses (which we all had, and had been taught to use earlier in the semester). I wasn't SURE which way I needed to go, but I had a feeling that I needed to go a particular direction to return to our van. I wasn't confident in that feeling, so I kept my mouth shut. The group veered off a bit from where I felt like we should go, but since I lacked confidence, I didn't bother speaking up. When we made it out and had to correct for being off a bit, it turned out that my "feelings" were pretty much spot on.

Now, give me a compass or a GPS with a good map, and I'm solid. I've spent entire summers wandering FAR more remote places off trail for work than I usually ride.

I really second the recommendation to learn orienteering skills.

This book is really informative - it's the one my college professor taught navigation from.
http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Map-Compass-Bjorn-Kjellstrom/dp/0470407654

Get out and practice, too. The practice is important. I've been getting myself "lost" in the woods since I was a kid. Even if they're small woodlots, finding your way out first with navigational aids, they're great places to start practicing and developing your instincts because they're low risk places. You're not going to practice those kinds of things in the largest tracts of uninhabited wilderness on the planet. You want to practice them in places that are somewhat familiar, low risk, and use progression to work your way up to increasingly difficult navigation situations.

I try not to stare at my map/compass/gps all the time when I'm moving through the woods. In particular, I'm talking, say, about times where we're scouting for new trails in areas with no existing trails, where the terrain is the best navigation aid that you have. Where the forests are too dense to sight a compass onto a distant landmark. I use my GPS as a tool in those cases to record where I have been, to save important locations, and to help me find specific things. In particular, on the last scouting trip I did, we were trying to find the boundary of a nature preserve we needed to avoid. We had a ballpark idea of its location and we hoped for some markings on the ground. But it was an old nature preserve, and no such markings existed. My GPS basemap DID have a digital boundary, so I used that and we added a conservative buffer to account for inaccuracy in the map. Then we flagged it so we could see on the ground what we needed to avoid.

When I'm on a trail, I generally don't think too much about specifically where I am. If the trail is a discrete loop, I never think about it because I know if I follow the trail, it will take me back to the starting point. If the trail is a point-to-point trail, how I handle it depends on my intentions. If I intend to connect to another trail at the other end, I will consult my maps when I reach the end of it, to see where I need to go from there and how far and all that. If I just intend to turn around and ride back, I also don't tend to think about location much.

Where I pay a LOT more attention to my location is when I'm riding a network of trails with complicated intersections. This is where it's important to have a good map of the trails that shows me all of the intersections, and which trails wind up where with distances. In those cases, I pay most of my attention to the locations of those intersections. The trails between them are easy to follow in most cases. When choosing a route, it's sort of a "connect the dots" type of arrangement.

The only time I start thinking about my location somewhere in the middle of a trail is when there's an emergency. Depending on where you are in the world and what your goal is, there are a number of strategies you can use to find your current location. Not all of which require a map and compass, but they're strategies that you need to practice. On mtb trails, it can be useful to count climbs. On a topo map, you can identify how many major climbs there are on a trail and if you're keeping track when you ride, you can get an idea of where you are. You can compare your orientation to a known terrain feature like a river or a ridgeline or a pond. You can look at the position of the sun related to the time of day. Practice practice practice.


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## MTBeing (Jan 11, 2012)

Can one reliably upload a GPX file to a 510 using Garmin Express/Garmin Connect? I have a 310 watch which will bread crumb a pre-loaded course but friggin Garmin Express cannot transfer a GC course to the watch. I love the watch but I'm getting sick of Garmin's lack of prowess around synchronization. What I ultimately want to do is to download GPX files from MTB Project, upload them to Garmin Connect, then d/l these to a device for following. If a 510 can do all this reliably, I'm all over it.


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## Harold (Dec 23, 2003)

Why are you using Garmin Connect/Express for this at all?

I understand that if the file resides on Connect at all, you might want to do it this way.

But you don't have to. Use somebody else's software if you're having trouble with Garmin's stuff.


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## MTBeing (Jan 11, 2012)

Harold said:


> Why are you using Garmin Connect/Express for this at all?
> 
> I understand that if the file resides on Connect at all, you might want to do it this way.
> 
> But you don't have to. Use somebody else's software if you're having trouble with Garmin's stuff.


I would love to if I could figure out how. The Forerunner connects wirelessly via a USB dongle to a PC using Garmin Express. I even went back to Ant Agent to see if that would work to no avail. I've also master reset the unit, thinking a fresh unit would work. Do you know of any software that could work for this?


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## Harold (Dec 23, 2003)

For the Forerunner 310XT, no. Garmin's software is the only option.

ANYTHING that will connect via USB does data transfers much better (which the Edge 510, or any Edge, will do), and you can use software that's not Garmin's.

Garmin has been screwing around with things on their end that will occasionally break my 310XT's ability to upload, even. It'll take days to get something to upload when it happens. There have been a few occasions of this. The last one got me using my Oregon 450 on my bike for awhile.

As for getting a course onto your device, maybe one of the comments in this thread will help:

https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?31194-Can-t-download-from-garmin-connect-to-310xt


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## MTBeing (Jan 11, 2012)

Thanks for your help/input!


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