Interested in this for my christmas list if I can save up enough spending money….

I’ve seen a couple of reviews online from a while ago but wondering if anyone on here has used one and how you rate it?

the main thing i’d hope to use it for is to get a pre-planned route and just follow directions on the unit…

I’ve not ever used any GPS thing, can you plot out a route at home and load it on so it tells you where to go? does it work out the waypoints where to turn or do you manually have to put them in?

what about if you get to a junction with say a couple of bridleways quite close to each other- do you often take the wrong one initially by mistake? not sure how accurrate the things are…

is the 1:50 OSmap readable and useful? do you also get a ‘normal’ road map for road riding as standard?

I thank you in advance- Cheers 🙂

I’ve got one, but I’ve not had much chance to use it off-road yet. I do know that it won’t do turn-by-turn directions off-road, so it’s a case of looking at the screen to see if you’re where you intended to be. You can plot out a route at home and upload it, so that you have a line on the screen showing where you want to go, so navigation is pretty easy, it just won’t tell you where to go.

Overall it’s a very good unit. The one annoying thing I’ve found is that the line showing you the route is the same colour as many roads on an OS map, and there’s no way to change it, so it can be hard to see your plotted route.

I’ve had mine a few months and found it to be great for both on and off road. I have the trail package with os mapping, which is great both on and off road. I found I’ve have now been scouring the os map and found interesting trails. I could have done this with a traditional map, but have to stop to read it. The ability to use other people’s routes is great. Have a look at garmin connect and sign up and see. I’m happy with mine, but it is alot if money.

The bog standard map that you get with the base package is useless, so budget for a new set of maps or research open source mapping.

pdw
I have one too. you can change the course colour line:
Once a course is selected, press the settings (wrench shape) button on the screen and then go to “line colour”. hope this helps.

Overall, its a great unit with the OS maps (zoomable so very readable),good on and off road, and it does alarm if you go off course. and using garmin connect to follow other peoples’ courses is fine.

However , lately I’ve been having problems with uploading courses that I have plotted out myself. Always used “bikeroutetoaster” and it was working great until the last update to the garmin communicator plug-in but I’m now not able to upload these courses (or the unit isn’t recognising them). Hopefully someone else will be along to explain a better way of uploading self-plotted courses.

loum
Save as .gpx from bikeroutetoaster, plug in Garmin via USB, open the unit itself in Windows Explorer, drop the .gpx into the NewFiles folder, and there you go!

Also, I love my 800, no more fannying with huge OS maps on 100 mile loops 🙂

Thanks Water. will try that later today.

Mine’s been ace. Very good for on the fly road rides with turn by turn navigation too (I’ve got the full UK OS 50k maps).

Following a trail is nice & clear and Garmion Connect makes sharing or creating routes a doddle.

The touch screen works very well, even with mud encrusted gloves. Battery life is very good too, as are the mounts themselves

I have one too. you can change the course colour line:
Once a course is selected, press the settings (wrench shape) button on the screen and then go to “line colour”. hope this helps.

Yep, but this has no effect on the line shown when actually navigating the course. It only changes the colour in the “preview” mode where you see all courses at once.

Water,
Thank you, that worked fine. Just dragged the gpx to the new files folder and it was available as a course when I disconnected it and switched on. Exactly what I wanted, thanks again.
pdw,
Sorry that didn’t help you. Its not something I’ve had a problem with tbh. With “turn guidance” on and orientation set as track up it buzzes as it approaches a junction and shows a big pink arrow indicating which way to go.

thanks for the info, guys!

I wonder why it doesnt do turn by turn off road? is it something to do with how it reads roads as data rather than off road maps as just an image?

another Q, when you are plotting out an off road route, say on your PC, does is allow you tend to do this with the garmin software and OS maps? otherwise how do you know where bridleways are etc to draw the route other than guessing from google maps satellite?

cheers

Can’t you add turns manually to a course? I’m sure you can

Garmin Oregon 450. Turn by turn only works on road because of the underlying mapping. Effectively on road you have a sat nav which is great. Off road you are following your trail on the OS map and location triangle. Not a big issue from my experience. I gues you could manually add points to prompt you to turn but why not just follow the obvious trail on the map? I rarely encounter a change in direction say at a X roads where I need to check the the turn.

Den,
I find it easiest to plot off road courses on Bikeroutetoaster.com
I was having probs uploading to the unit recently but sorted now (thanks Water).
Have a play about on their website on course creater (particularlly the “cycle” map), you’ll pick it up easy, then just drag and drop the gpx file 🙂
Other similar sites worth a look are bikely.com , trailzilla , bikehike.
The key advantage is the use of openstreetmap (free) with detailed bridleways, cyclepaths, etc.
Garminconnect can plot couses , but like you said, the detail isn’t there on the online map. Probably due to OS license costs.
I’m sure I’ve not had problems with turns off road, but I’ll check again tomorrow.

nice one- bikeroutetoaster looks awesome with the cycle tab.

Hmmm could be up for a purchase of the garmin!

Pdw the rubbish workaround is to set the course to always display on map then it is shown in selected colour

Pdw the rubbish workaround is to set the course to always display on map then it is shown in selected colour

Interesting – but unless I’m missing something, if you actually want to navigate the course, the stupid pink line still overrides the course colour.

The really annoying thing is that the track showing you where you’ve been is a nice bright blue. If they just swapped the colours it’d be an improvement…

pdw: You nav to the beginning of the course then (bizarre I know) switch the course nav off and follow the line that will be shown permanently. I don’t use routing so this would work.