I’m looking at getting a Garmin 800 with the Discoverer 1:50 map pack and was wondering if it’s any good for using off road?

I’m thinking of using it for finding routes in the Surrey Hills area as well as uploading some of the trails that are in MBR every month.

What’s peoples experiences with it?

I’ve got them. Don’t rate the maps as they are bitmapped and quality is poor when you zoom in. I replaced them with openstreetmap vector mapping.

Do you use the openstreetmap in place of the Discoverer ones or do you need them both?

Does the openstreetmap mapping work well on road as well as off road?

You can only have one map on the edge at a time so I replaced them

OSM road mapping is fantastic, it is off road where it is not as good

I use the OS discoverer maps. There only 1:50 so you can zoom in as much as DavidB obviously wants too. I use them and find them infinitely better than the OSM maps. There OS for god’s sake.

David – have you tried the openmtbmap.org maps? Should be a notch up from the OSM ones. Certainly good for the Purbecks but that’s the only place I’ve really tried them so far.

My buddy has one, and while we carry a paper map, in reality you could get away without one.

Best thing about the 800 (and any mapping GPS I guess), is that if you don’t know where you are – look at it. Really good for todays North Downs ride, especially as I don’t know it so well.

^^ this

I found the 1:50k lacking, for me many paths and bridleways I know are there don’t show. I downloaded openstreetmap and it’s alot better.

I reckon if you want to use it properly off road you need to stump up for the 1:25k mapping for the area you ride.

To be honest I mainly use my 800 to record my rides, the few times I’ve tried to follow other peoples tracks with it was very hit and miss. The best feature in my opinion is when you get lost you can get it to navigate you straight back to your car 🙂

I find them absolutely fine. You really don’t need to be zooming in to the extent the image goes pixely. If you are lost, then it’s far more likely (and useful) that you’ll be zooming out

1:25k all the way – when zoomed to 1:3k in conjunction with the 1:25k map detail it is pretty easy to follow a route at a good speed, esp if the map orientates itself to the direction you are riding.

I use a Satmap.

The more I read about the different maps available, the more confused I’m getting!

If I were to upload the trails shown on this Swinley map to an Edge 800, would I be able to navigate the trails with the 800 or is that expecting a bit much of it?

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.3759&lon=-0.7443&zoom=14&layers=0B00FTF

I follow a bloke who has a Satmap

Do this, it’s AWESOME !

failing that, I suppose you could get yr own satmap (it is excellent IMO)

Is there anyway to get 1:25k maps from Memory Map onto a 800?