Garmin Edge 540

I bought this because my Wahoo battery failed while riding the GDMBR. REI swapped out the Wahoo for this Garmin. I found the Garmin to be very difficult to use and hard to find support for. But, I preserved and with a lot of fiddling around with it, got it to work. Every time Garmin updated it, I would have to go back in and reset my settings. Lately it has started getting stuck in a weird loop so I connected it to Garmin express and found that almost all of the memory was taken by”other”. I tried resetting it to factory settings but the other remained. Customer service knew less than ChatGPT about how a Mac and how MacOS now doesn’t see the Garmin as a drive. Weeks of back and forth and Garmin’s rep (Bella) ghosted me. I’m out! No more Garmin products for me. Watch Market Place for my inReach.

Pretty sure I got a dud because if everyone writing these reviews got what I got they’d all be 1 star. It freezes literally everytime I turn it on and won’t unfreeze till you hold down the power button for a long time and then wait another several minutes and somehow loses 30% of its battery in the process. When I first started using it it wouldn’t stop screaming at me everytime I hit a jump (on a literal jump trail) to tell me I hit a jump, and the climb pro would yell at me everytime 12 seconds while climbing to tell me I was about to start a 16 foot climb. Overall just super annoying and I hate it.

When it works, it is great. When, for no reason, it changes my map view from a useful scale to showing the entire 2700 mile long route (I'm on the Divide) it is useless. That is only one of the strange things this divice does. I am unhappy with the unit several times per day and may get fed up and return it.

I purchased this to replace a Garmin edge 520 that I had for roughly 10 years. That computer served me well but the battery life was starting to wane and because I do a lot of long distance touring, I wanted a more robust battery life. So far, I’ve only had to charge this new computer once. The battery indicates it’s at 50% charge, despite the fact that I’ve probably ridden the more than 12 hours, which included a 75-mile training ride. So for me, the 540 is out, performing the promised specs, and I am very happy with it. This is also extremely feature packed, particularly as compared with the bike computer that I used for so long. I am probably using only a small amount of its capabilities as I only really care about the ability to load routes and navigate, and keep track of speed, distance, and direction. This does all of that, of course.

This is my fourth Garmin, and I have been happy with each. Unfortunately, this one was not ready for the job, after three tries and a hard reset, I had to return. Hopefully the replacement will work