GPS for bike

mr blonde 31

Hi

I am looking for a GPS unit to use on my cycle rides. At the moment the main driver is that I am cycling from Lands End to John O'Groats soon and would like to use it on that to save carrying lots of maps and the constant stopping to check where we are and where we need to turn next. I also do some MTB riding and may consider doing some longish off road stints next year such as the CTC.

As far as I can tell there seem to be two units that jump out everywhere the Garmin Edge 605/705 and the Satmap Active 10.

The Edge unit (particularly the 705) seems to have a lot of extra cycling related functions which I am not sure that I would use immediately but may do in the future, but it does provide routing and can plot a route between two points for you. Points against are the poor Topo maps.

The Satmap seems to have good quality OS maps but lacks automatic route calculating functions. I have also seen many negative comments on its battery life.

Anybody have any thoughts or done any comparisons between the two?

billiobob

I have tried a Garmin Legend small GPS mounted on my bar. Its too small to read when cycling and a real pain to plot routes on requiring transfers using a pc. Not much good when riding from Lands end to John O'Groats. The Tom Tom in my car is completely different simple to use big screen all maps on it etc. I have found that you can get a bar mount for it and am in the process of getting one. The only disadvantage might be charging it up if you are camping and actual battery life on the road, although you could switch it off when you don't actual need it.

stevercp

have a look at this
http://www.satmap.com/about.php
got a good review in c+
rechargeable battery and bike mount
not cheap tho

Rob Sallnow

mr blonde 31 wrote:

Hi

As far as I can tell there seem to be two units that jump out everywhere the Garmin Edge 605/705 and the Satmap Active 10.

The Edge unit (particularly the 705) seems to have a lot of extra cycling related functions which I am not sure that I would use immediately but may do in the future, but it does provide routing and can plot a route between two points for you. Points against are the poor Topo maps.

The Satmap seems to have good quality OS maps but lacks automatic route calculating functions. I have also seen many negative comments on its battery life.

Anybody have any thoughts or done any comparisons between the two?

I'd say battery life of the Satmap is great...3 x 2500mAh rechargeables lasts 8 or 9 hours with the backlit screen on all the time.....that's pretty fab in my book....Satmap literature did talk about anything up to 50 hours months before it was released and that was never going to be realistic.

Surely half the pleasure of LEJOG is the planning of your route, not getting a computer to work one out for you, especially as you won't be able to program it to select roads you like or take in a point of interest you particularly want to ride past.

ellieb

I've got a Satmap. I wouldn't necessarily say it is disappointing, but you have got to be realistic about what it can do.

With the rechargeable battery pack I got about 8 hours use with it on 100% screen backlight. The battery indicator isn't great. It went from 3/4 full display down to zero in very quick time.

It is not that easy to read in sunlight, especially with sunglasses. The route marker line tends to cover over the detail of what you are about to cycle over so you can't tell if you are looking for a track or a road. You cannot really navigate as you go along if the route is complex. You really need to stop and look at it carefully. It doesn't allow you to follow a route in the way a car satnav or some other GPS units do. There is no running commentary to tell you when to turn.

The trip length seriously underreads. On my last journey it showed 6% less than my other GPS & cycle computer. The ETA calculations are crude. The altimeter function innacurate enough to be unuseable.

For serious off road navigation it isn't that easy to use it to plan: It isn't as easy as looking at a map and comparing what you can see with compass bearings.

Having to restart the trip page at the same time as starting a route can be a pain.

It is expensive.

On the other hand it is very easy to make a route & there is no doubt the OS map is handy.

I won't say 'don't buy one' because it has its uses, but don't expect to be able to cycle along and just be able to glance at it to tell you where to go. Essentially it tells you where you are, not necessarily where you should be going. You need to study the display while stopped to make sense of what is coming up.

ColinJ

I use the bottom of the range Garmin Etrex in conjunction with Memory Map software. I have seamless OS mapping for the whole UK at 1:50:000 scale so there is no faffing about when going 'over the border' between two maps.

That Etrex doesn't have built-in mapping at all. I do all my route planning at home and upload the routes from Memory Map to the GPS then I just follow the 'breadcrumb trail' on the display.

I've done about 2,500 km this way now without getting lost. I met one guy on an audax who was using an upmarket Etrex with built-in mapping and he'd got lost several times in that one ride! I don't like to be staring at a little electronic map when I'm riding. It's MUCH easier to work it all out at home on my big LCD monitor.

Of course, this method doesn't allow for doing detours but you can always go off-route and then follow your tracklog back to where you left the route and then resume the original route.

The Etrex lasts 27 hours on one pair of 2,700 mAH NiMH AA cells (without using the backlight). You don't need the light on unless you ride at night. If I was doing a long trip I'd be tempted to just use Duracells for that to save carrying a charger.

I think that you should be able to get a whole LEJOG's worth of routes into the available GPS memory so that you don't have to mess about uploading more routes while on your journey. It would depend on how many twists and turns you did, and your GPS's capacity.

About not carrying maps... My GPS has been totally reliable, but it is still a piece of electronic technology and even though modern kit is very good, faults can still occur so I always carry paper maps for backup. Pages torn from a road atlas should be enough for emergency use. I wouldn't bother carrying £100 worth of OS maps (NB you can print maps from the Memory Map s/w to save the cost of buying OS maps).

andrew_s

I use a garmin 60CSx, which I think offers much the same mapping and routing capability as the 605/705.

The Garmin can be given a set of routes made up from points that you want to pass through, and routes defined by the points you want to pass through. It will pick the route between the points you've specified, and direct you accordingly on a turn by turn basis, with a warning beep and a junction diagram displayed as you approach each turn ("Follow road mode"). This automatic routing is a great help when you are passing through strange towns. You will need to define about 1 point every 5-15km to ensure that the direct route between defined points goes the way you've planned and not along an unsuitable (major) road. There will be no problem loading up the entire route in advance.
Deviations can be just a matter of ignoring the prompts and going a different way. If you've got it set to "no U-turns", it will take you to the next planned point a new way.
It isn't too difficult to set up an alternative route when you are on the ride, but the small screen and lack of any real detail other than the road layout means that you really want some sort of paper mapping to do the planning on. Reckon on about 1 point per minute when entering routes directly on the GPS rather than downloading from PC.

The routes can be worked out beforehand on the Garmin maps (if you bought the DVD version rather than the SD card version), Google Maps or one of the sites based on it, or on MemoryMap or similar.

Maps:
For either of the options you will have to budget somewhere between £60 and £150 for mapping data on top of the price of the GPS - City Navigator or Metroguide on the Garmin, or own-brand OS 1:50,000 on the Satmap (MemoryMap etc doesn't work).

City Navigator is the official pukka version of the mapping - £130-£140 for most of Europe on DVD, £80 on SD card.
SD card versions of the garmin maps are cheaper, but if you lose the card or corrupt the data on it, tough. If you want to log your rides properly to the SD card, or add your own set of Points of Interest (such as campsites of GBG pubs), you would have to worry about corrupting the maps.
Metroguide is the cheaper version. It officially doesn't do automatic routing on the GPS (just on PC) so you'd have to set up a point at every junction. However there is a hack available that fixes this problem (Metrowhizz or MetroGold) so that it works the same as CN.
TopoGB is UK only, and gives full contour and small stream information as well as the roads. There are also a fair number of paths (display only, not routing). This means that it's of some use off road, but there's a downside in that the contours make it hard to distinguish the road detail if you aren't off road. The smaller roads also turn off as you zoom out sooner than they do on CN/Metroguide.

A disadvantage of the garmin maps is that they don't give all the extra information about the countryside you are riding through that you find on the Satmap OS maps. You could be surprised by a multi-arrow hill or pass a mile from Stonehenge and never realise it was there. They are also pretty much useless off road (except TopoGB).

mr blonde 31

I have already planned the route on Bikely, but on some of the practise rides I did with my brother and sister who are also doing the LEJOG with me, we seemed to spend a very large portion of time stopping to check the map. And even when we thought we were on the right road from notes (made by my brother) before hand we still ended up on the wrong road and doing extra mileage to get to the right place. We'd probably still carry OS maps as a backup (I have learnt not to 100% trust technology).
We just want to be able to focus on the cycling and not making sure we are going the right way. Perhaps if I do the planning things will work out better.
Sounds like the SatMap benefits don't actually all work out that well, perhaps better for the walker than the rider! I'm not sure off road I'd really want a big GPS unit in the way any how, and I'd probably be paranoid about breaking it.

Rob Sallnow

ellieb wrote:

The route marker line tends to cover over the detail of what you are about to cycle over so you can't tell if you are looking for a track or a road. You cannot really navigate as you go along if the route is complex...............

I won't say 'don't buy one' because it has its uses, but don't expect to be able to cycle along and just be able to glance at it to tell you where to go. Essentially it tells you where you are, not necessarily where you should be going. You need to study the display while stopped to make sense of what is coming up.

When I plot a route to use out on the road (as opposed to the version I do to get a good idea of how long the ride will be) I plot the route in such a way that the route marker line doesn't cover the road I'm riding on or the junction that I have to turn at....thaat way I can cycle along and just glance at it to see where I have to go without stopping.

ColinJ

Rob Sallnow wrote:

When I plot a route to use out on the road (as opposed to the version I do to get a good idea of how long the ride will be) I plot the route in such a way that the route marker line doesn't cover the road I'm riding on or the junction that I have to turn at....thaat way I can cycle along and just glance at it to see where I have to go without stopping.

Same here - I plot each route in great detail so that I can calculate the exact distance and an accurate profile. This version typically contains far too many waypoints and would exceed the memory capacity of my GPS so I take a copy and edit out all surplus detail.

I leave waypoints at each place where I have to make a decision about where to go (i.e. junctions and roundabouts). I leave some extra waypoints in where the road meanders about a lot between junctions just so the breadcrumb trail I follow doesn't deviate too much from the road (it is a bit disconcerting when the trail approximation is so far off the actual road that I am left with a blank GPS screen).

I've found from experience that some junctions can be hard to navigate at a glance from the GPS route trail alone, so I label the waypoints with extra information based on the system described here.