Originally Posted by
melgarpoe
Really not sure what you're all talking about regarding needing a special cable for charging the Garmin Edge series GPS computers while on a ride. I've got an external battery pack that I use with any old USB cable that I've got lying around, not the one that came with my Edge 800.
To get the GPS to charge or run on external battery power without shutting down and going into the recharge mode, here's all you have to do: Plug the Edge into your external power source while the GPS is already on and started. As long as it's started, when you plug it in, it will just keep running and recording your ride. I've done this many dozens of times over the years that I've owned the Edge and it has always worked, no matter what USB cable I've used. The longest I've ever kept it going is about 40 hours and it worked fine.
My bigger issue with the Edge 800 is that if you have a route loaded and running and at the same time you're recording a long ride, it seems to be a bit more than the 800 can handle. On many occasions I've had the thing crash and lose all the data I've recorded. Nowadays, I'm mostly able to get around this by saving my longer rides in about 100 mile increments as I pedal. I just reach down, press stop, then hold the reset/save button until the data is saved. Then I restart the computer and begin my next 100 mile segment. It's annoying, but at least I get my entire ride recorded, no matter how long it happens to be.
I never had a problem with my 800 after I figured out the correct settings. My protocols: I never load or record data into the main 800 memory. Instead, I use 4-8 GB microSD cards. The 800 is set to record to the card. My map is on the card. I only have one route at a time on the card. If I'm doing a very long ride, I break the TCX route into 200k-400k segments and load each segment onto a different card. Each card has the correct map on it, of course. When I swap cards, the saved route is also swapped out. This way the 800 is never confused about which route it's supposed to be following and I never run out of memory. I usually use shorter ~200k segments just because its more convenient to map shorter segments on the computer.
I never plug my 800 into a computer. I charge it with a charger. The cards go into a USB card reader for data transfer.