What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

General cycling advice ( NOT technical ! )
Bez
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by Bez »

martinn wrote:So wahoo or Hammerhead? There is an offer price for the Hammerhead at present.


How much? I can't seem to find one. Seems to be $300 in the States which is pretty competitive.

It certainly looks interesting. From a quick skim of a few "hands on" articles I'd have the following potential concerns:
- the pre-production data screen looks poor from a typography point of view but it also looks unfinished, so hopefully it'll be more readable
- the mapping appears to be well up the richness end of the spectrum rather than the clarity end, which isn't my preference, but it is just that: a preference
- I'd be interested to know how well the interface is optimised for use with just the buttons rather than the touchscreen

Looks potentially very good, though. Having said that, your criteria (turn notification, readable map, auto map display) are well met by Garmin… the price is obviously poor battery life and clunky usability.

(On the subject of readable maps, I've been playing with custom styling Openfietsmap UK mapping for the Garmin and I've made it a lot clearer than Garmin's own styles. I'll make it available for download once I've finished tweaking it.)
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Heltor Chasca
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by Heltor Chasca »

One thing I'll say about my Gamin Touring is that the touch screen was poor in comparison to an iPhone. Didn't work with 'touchscreen capable' gloves, when wet, when cold and was generally unresponsive. I think Garmin tried to be too clever and did a half job.

So the fact my Wahoo has very ergonomic, positive buttons is a great thing.
Bez
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by Bez »

Heltor Chasca wrote:One thing I'll say about my Gamin Touring is that the touch screen was poor in comparison to an iPhone. Didn't work with 'touchscreen capable' gloves, when wet, when cold and was generally unresponsive. I think Garmin tried to be too clever and did a half job.


It's not a half job, it's a different technology to what you're used to. There are two types of touchscreen: capacitive and resistive (some early touchscreen phones also used resistive screens, eg the Nokia 5800). The former works by conduction across your fingertip (or some other medium such as metallic fibres sewn into a glove) whilst the latter works by the application of pressure.

Smartphones and more recent Garmin Edges, such as the 510 and 1000, have capacitive touchscreens, while the Touring/800 has a resistive touchscreen.

They need to be used differently.

A resistive touchscreen won't respond well to a light fingertip touch that is required for a capacitive screen, and touchscreen-specific gloves (which have conductive fingertips) make no difference on resistive screens. I tend to find that the best way of controlling a resistive screen is to use a fingernail: it's capable of applying sufficient pressure without much force, and with practice you can be very precise. Obviously that doesn't work well with most gloves and you need a bit more force (it also doesn't work with capacitive screens, unless they're set to be sufficiently sensitive that the skin provides adequate conduction at a small distance from the screen, but even then it's not the fingernail that's doing the work).
PH
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by PH »

Heltor Chasca wrote:One thing I'll say about my Gamin Touring is that the touch screen was poor in comparison to an iPhone. Didn't work with 'touchscreen capable' gloves, when wet, when cold and was generally unresponsive. I think Garmin tried to be too clever and did a half job.

I don't touch my Garmin when moving, I don't see any need. If I'm navigating I'll have it on the map screen with speed and distance in the data fields, if I'm not I'll have it on the data screen. When I see people weaving all over the road fiddling with them, I have no idea what they're doing.
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Heltor Chasca
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by Heltor Chasca »

Fascinating! Thanks Bez. My ignorant 'half job' judgement was perhaps harsh, but unfortunately one of many frustrations I had with Garmin.

Enough to loose my loyalty I'm afraid. And I wasn't confident enough to try one of their 510s or 1000s because of the software and customer service issues. In my tiny mind I couldn't see how the after sales service, Garmin Connect, mapping, etc would improve by me simply upgrading my devices.
Bez
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by Bez »

All valid concerns ;)
martinn
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by martinn »

Hi Yes,

After seeing so much angst which seemed to have a Garmin origin, I am wary of buying a Garmin.
My worry with the Hammerhead is that it's first generation, which is not even released yet, so the reliability might be poor. The approximate UK offer price, including customs and delivery is estimated at £280-£290. The final price is going to be around £400-£450.
Looking around further I came across Bryton looking at the ride 60. Any thoughts on this one?

This would seem to be a good area for an in-depth review by c-uk to show the pros and cons of each unit

Martin
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Sweep
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by Sweep »

Will have to reread this thread to see all this garmin angst.

I have a garmin etrex20, one of the cheapest*

Despite the odd quirk am more than happy with it.

* may be a big reason for my satisfaction, lots of products these days fall down trying to be too clever by half/too sophisticated.
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freeflow
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by freeflow »

The issue with Bryton used to be that it was impossible to load a route without going through their website. It's why I finally gave up on my Bryton 50 and moved to android phones. This was in 2013 and I haven't looked back since.

Phones were

Sony arc S (ant+ enabled)
2 X Sony Xperia Z Ultra (ant+ enabled)
Honour Note 8

The initial Sony was £20:second hand off eBay used as proof of concept. The Xperia Z Ultra lasted about 18 months each before succumbing to non cycling clumsiness on my part.

The Honour Note 8 isn't waterproof or ant+ enabled but a plastic bag resolves the former issue when needed and Bluetooth has improved to the extent that ant+ is no longer essential.

In all the times I had my phone mounted on the handlebars it has never become detached from the holder but can be removed in 2 seconds if required. That includes a double Rrty (2400+ km of riding) in 2015/16 and riding numerous bridal ways and gravel tracks.
Bez
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by Bez »

I've used phones before: mostly a Sony Xperia Active but also briefly a Motorola Defy+ (which basically drowned on its first outing). I modified both by Sugruing a quarter turn mount to the back, so they worked with the Garmin mounts.

There are some appealing aspects to a phone as a Garmin replacement, but a lot of shortcomings too. And I'm not sure there are any modern phones as well suited to the task as the Xperia Active (which was not only waterproof but similarly sized to a Garmin Edge, ie nowhere near the size of most modern phones). Sadly it's got to the point now where too few applications still work well enough on the Xperia/Gingerbread (eg OsmAnd won't run at all) so it's become slightly obsolete. I'd be tempted to use my Moto G3 (also waterproof), but it's too big for the job really.
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Sweep
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by Sweep »

freeflow wrote: riding numerous bridal ways and gravel tracks.


am impressed. bridal ways can be very rough indeed.
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freeflow
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by freeflow »

freeflow wrote:
riding numerous bridal ways and gravel tracks.


am impressed. bridal ways can be very rough indeed.


Ha ha ha ha ha ha :D
Boyd
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by Boyd »

The one I want to sell you!!
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RickH
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by RickH »

With Wahoo units, my understanding is that you can only get turn-by-turn navigation for routes created in RidewithGPS. Routes imported to RWGPS won't get turn-by-turn added. Also you can't use the unit to navigate you somewhere on the fly - you need to use the app on a phone to do that then download the route to the Wahoo, which also means it can't re-route if you, deliberately or otherwise, deviate from its planned route.

The Garmin Edges have the routing/re-routing facility built in to the mapping. My old 605 was, admittedly, rubbish at auto-re-routing, mainly because it was so slow. You could get into an endless loop unless you stopped after missing a turn - it would start to recalculate but you would probably have already passed the next turn by the time it had thought it out, so it would start to re-calculate but you would have passed the turn... :?

Last year I stumped up for a 1000 when the there was a significant price dip at the time of the 820 release and overall I've been very pleased with it - a much bigger screen in a similar sized unit. There was a period of a few days when it struggled to find a GPS fix, I never figured out exactly why but my suspicion is a corrupt table of where to expect satellites to be (that in theory should speed up getting a fix). I think there were 3 non-consecutive days where it had a problem then it went away again. The OSM based mapping is much better that City Navigator. The in-built turn-by-turn seems to work well (if I plot a route on cycle.travel I usually run it through bikehike to strip out cycle.travel's self generated turn-by-turns, especially as they can sometimes be a bit random). I've not used the unit to self plot a route in anger but when I've tested it by asking it to route between known points it has come up with a sensible route, usually quite similar to what I would have chosen. Plus you have various options to let you fine-tune the routing.

That's my take on things - YMMV as they say.
Former member of the Cult of the Polystyrene Head Carbuncle.
Bez
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Re: What is the best Garmin or GPS (not smart phone) for touring

Post by Bez »

RickH wrote:With Wahoo units, my understanding is that you can only get turn-by-turn navigation for routes created in RidewithGPS. Routes imported to RWGPS won't get turn-by-turn added.


RWGPS's "cue points" provide the turn directions on the Wahoo. There are two ways of creating them in RWGPS. One is to have them automatically created when using the "follow roads" feature, which gives you the same turn directions that Google produce. But you can also add them manually, which you can do to any route.

Naturally there are pros and cons: the former takes no effort but might provide more cues than you want and can't be retro-fitted to imported routes; the latter can be done to suit your own preferences, and on any route, but takes a little time (though note that you don't need to add text; you can just drop a marker, select the cue type, and save it).
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