Drake wrote:Ladies and Gentleman . When i first posted this thread,i thought it was a fairly simple request . . but it doesn't appear to be so .
I was always under the impression that GPS and Sat Nav systems were one and the same . . obviously not,or have i got that wrong .
So perhaps you can understand that when i said i'm a "digital dummy",i've never said a truer word .
Obviously with car systems,you can type in a post code and the sat nav guides you there,and that seems to work very well . I only have experience of the Tom Tom system and their screen displays,which gives clear information as to where i am ect ect .
So i get the impression that bike systems are not the same format . . that you have to down load maps of the area you wish to travel in,and the GPS indicates where you are in relation to that map . . would that be a fair assumption ?
The trouble is, the criteria for cycling is typically more complicated than for driving. If you're happy to cycle on any road, you'd probably find a cycling satnav as good as a car one. Well, it'd be the same
Just say "whoops officer, I must have had my car stolen! The bike was on the roof rack a few minutes ago and now I'm cycling it! Heh. Have you seen a blue Astra with a wife and 2 kids anywhere on your travels?" when you get stopped on the M42
Even if you remove these obvious faux pas roads, one cyclist's perfect road or cycle path is another's nightmare that he wants to avoid at all costs.
Another thing is, often you won't notice or care if a car satnav goes slightly wrong or something happens to change your route, whereas on a bike you will. e.g the other day I cycled to within 20 minutes of my home, and having just done a large stretch that was downhill with a trailing wind was met by 2 police officers saying 'you can't go this way, the road's closed there's been an accident" - I kind of pointed out that I could walk past on a bike without an issue and even pick the bike up and carry it across the field at the side if the road really was completely blocked, but they weren't having it.
So instead of a 20 minute cycle home down this road and then a trip along the canal, I either had to find a new unplanned diversion, or turn back and go backwards around the loop I was doing, up the hill, against the wind as the temperature was dropping and I was rapidly losing light. Had my GPS sent me down the wrong road and made me turn back like that, I might have been cursing it for sending me awry. On a summer day at 3pm I might have turned back and gone up and down the hill twice anyway, out of choice. The point is, all the cars being sent packing didn't really have any issue, except a few extra miles on their route.
The problem is, cycling sucks as a means of transport and incidents can sometimes happen to remove the thin layer of stuff we do to hide the suckage and make it appear like a sane way to get somewhere. One of those incidents that happens sometimes is satnav routing.
Hence, the best idea for navigation means planning your route beforehand (or getting someone else to, and downloading their route from one of these routing sites), loading it onto the unit and following the breadcrumb trail. And then the route most likely doesn't suck. Until there's a 6 car pile up on the road you want to go down.
From there, you have to decide whether you want "fitness" features in addition to navigation, and whether you need or want to see the map for the trail you're following or if you're happy just with an arrow and a squiggly black line showing where the route goes. Both of which bump the price. I tend to use my dakota 10 by uploading a trail, and then setting it to display 'track up' (rather than north up) so basically I'm the arrow at the bottom of the screen and I can see the direction the trail goes in the middle of the screen, and the top displays the speed I'm moving at. All very easy (and safe) to see at a glance, like looking at a dashboard on a car. Although there's a map it's not really key to the navigation.
Trouble is, I really want the fitness info and it niggles a bit that I've got something that does everything else I need and I have to spend £200 to get something else that feels like it has less features overall albeit a few useful ones I don't currently have.
The other thing to consider is, most bike mounted GPS devices have screens that are so small the map is pretty useless to use to plan a route on or to read that well.
You may be as well using a smartphone that's kept in your pocket if you ever need to look at a map (assuming, like most of the population, you own a smartphone anyway, it's not really additional expense) or carrying a paper map that folds out. What's the edge 800 resolution? 160x240 pixels? It's not exactly HD ready mapping is it?
Openstreet mapping works well and is cheap ime. Other mapping is overpriced imo and questionable how good it is for cycling. It tends to be stuff aimed at ramblers, Ordnance Survey, or cars, City navigator.
But I would say, Dakota 10 / 20 is pretty good for bike mounted navigation - so long as you don't need the cycle stuff. For cycling GPS, the edge 500 seems like it may be great for a fitness device, and if you load a planned route as trail, but it's not a navigation device. The edge 800 seems very expensive. Especially when you see car satnavs going for well under £100.
I'm wondering which one to get myself, albeit I'm coming more from the fitness / speed / cadence / HRM info side. To me the edge 500 potentially looks fiddly and possibly a bit fragile (although I've never seen one in the flesh perhaps they are better than they look and size and those flaky looking buttons suggests) Similarly, I wonder how well the cadence sensor fares - reading forums its performance seems a bit of a mixed bag. It's as though they made its primary feature the size, because of what some professional tour de France riders wanted. Whereas the edge 800 seems way overpriced. I think if the edge 500 was £100 I'd get it, I wouldn't care if it had a few foibles. At £200? I just wish it didn't look like a £25 bike computer in photos - and I'm wondering if I'd be as well sticking a £25 bike computer on the handlebars next to my dakota)
I'm tempted to get a NOH (which is garmin's acronym for factory reconditioned units) 705, which is about the same price as the edge 500 now.
I notice other people more or less copying the edge devices with their own takes on it. From what I saw they all seemed to lack some feature (or even just a field) that I wanted. Most of them seem to be using
openstreet mapping.