I’ve never used it. I’ve turned it on a few times and found satellites, and seems to find them. It seems to have a map of sorts, but nothing with any useful detail. Turning it on here in Coburg, it just shows a dot on a screen. Zooming out seems to show a road or two a long way away.
What should I do with it? For example, if I wanted to go out to Plenty Gorge on my MTB and follow Prolly’s strava route out there, how do I do that? I’d be happy to give someone beer or roasted brussel sprouts or whatever for helping me set it up.
You should be able to download other people’s rides (from Strava for example) commonly as a GPX or TCX? file. And then copy that onto the Garmin’s SD card as a route. Then you tell the Garmin to follow the route.
Sounds like you might need topographic maps to get what you need. Garmins without maps at all will still follow routes but the only guidance you get is a compass arrow. My 810 has topo maps so I can do very detailed navigation. But I’ve only ever used it once to get to Blakey’s house, even though I knew how to get there. I’m not sure how well it would work if you have base maps but no topo maps. My guess would be that it will work fine but you just won’t see the detailed map.
You might need a ‘base map’, try Shonkymaps by Shonkylogic (not as shonky as title suggests), or try an OpenStreeMap base map from Free worldwide Garmin maps from OpenStreetMap I think the Bicycle option is pretty close to OpenCycleMap. Copy the *.img over to your Garmin, let it do its thing and you should see street names etc.
Snowflake is on the money about tcx/gpx files, only Strava premium can grab GPXs IIRC?
Don’t pay money for a basemap or get one from Garmin, they’ll probably suck.
