While I love using my Garmin Edge for navigation while bicycling, I know they aren’t perfect or exactly easy to use!

The goal of this course is to use the Garmin Edge on the bike more effectively, deal with problems that can happen while navigating, and (maybe) avoiding some of those problems in the first place. The course explores how navigation works on the Garmin Edges (which means that what it does should seem less mysterious).

The course covers route planning (mostly using ridewithgps.com) so that you’ll spend less time making routes that work better for navigation. It also shows how you can get free high-quality maps (useful, in particular, if you travel to other countries).

This course is fairly technical and goes into “nuts and bolts” detail about how things work. While it is mostly for people who have any of the Garmin Edge models that use maps (and have used them some for navigating), that isn’t a requirement. If you have an Edge 500 (or some other Garmin without maps) and want to use it for navigation, taking this course would be useful for you.

The course is limited to 15 people, and will probably be offered again. If you have a tablet/laptop that you can use to read PDF files, I’ll provide the “slides” as a PDF file. You don’t need to bring your Garmin, as there won’t be enough time to do too much “hands on” stuff.

Sign up in the Ride Schedule section under May 12th.

When: May 12, 2015, 6:45 – 8:45 p.m.

Where: Ridgewood Public Library     125 N Maple Avenue         Ridgewood, NJ 07450

Directions: www.ridgewoodlibrary.org/directions.htm

— David Pawlyk