Hey all

Car sat-nav and bike got nicked. Police found bike (Dursley, Glos police are like a modern day A-Team), sat-nav lost forever. This was a compromise I was more than happy to make.

Anyway… Was going to buy a new sat-nav but then thought:

– Sat navs are usually pretty rubbish and I only use in dire situations
– This is an awful amount of money for a couple of uses a year.
– I like new things.
– I like new things for my bike even more.
– My wife does not like me buying new things for my bike.
– My wife has accepted that we need a sat-nav.

Can I somehow bend the rules and get a bike GPS which will double up as a sat-nav? Anyone had any success in this? Obviously understand that won’t be as big or have the sat-nav voice, but willing to compromise by just sellotaping it to dash and using visually.

Anyone have any advice? Main worry is that they seem to have bike route specific maps.

Thanks

Nick

You could use an edge 800 or one of the more modern ones easily enough. Pretty sure I can set it to route via motorways if I want. The maps are the same as the normal garmins

Even the Edge 1000 can only do 5 digit postcode recognition, so it’s a bit of a faff compared to car satnavs which do the full 7 digits.

Small screen too, fine with a passenger, but I’d not fancy actually trying to navigate from them. No audible instructions either.

The edge 800 (and the 810) is utterly crap as a satnav.

I mean really shit.

1) it really likes ring roads, especialy Reading, which for a bike device is a nightmare

2) if you miss a turn it trys to get you back on the route rather than just re-calculating*, this is infuriating if you try and ride round some roadworks.

3) the postcode thing makes it useless

4) the screen isn’t very bright, so it would be useless in either sunlight, dim light, or at night (it’s barely readable on a bike let alone in a car).

*garmin car sat-navs are pretty bad for this too though TBF, tom-tom seem to recognise that you may have just turned off the road deliberately.

I bought my 800 with a mix of my own cash and some halfords vouchers, if I’d paid £300 of my own cash I’d have been really pissed off with how generaly rubbish it is compared to any othr £300 electronic device, as it only ‘cost’ me £200 I’m just really annoyed with it.

If you want a cheep occasional car sat nav, just get a cheep android smartphone and use the google navigation app, it’s great as long as there’s phone reception (if there’s not, just don’t get lost as it relies on the google server to re-calculate rather than the phone).

I just bought a widescreen Garmin NUVI (LM 54 I think) from Halfords, full Europe mapping, and lifetime mapping updates, for £90.

They are definitely cheaper than they used to be.