No; the answer isn’t “A map”.

I’m planning to ride from Dorset to Sheffield (on road) over a few days as a holiday, visiting various bits of the family on the way. While I know the Sheffield end fairly well these days, I don’t know the south end of the trip at all from a biking perspective.

I don’t want to use my iphone except as an emergency backup, because of the data costs and battery life, and so I’m looking at GPS systems, but have no idea which one I need. At the moment, the Garmin Edge touring looks like the best bet, but I can’t find anything that will tell me whether/how I can create a route on the computer and follow it on whichever unit I use.

Any advice? Anywhere that would hire something out? Anyone prepared to lend me something appropriate, or got the right thing for sale?

because of the data costs and battery life,

Back Country Navigator and download to your phone the map sections you need at the scale you need, no data required (do it on you’re wifi at home). Buy a small back up battery pack if you’re worried about battery life, you do realise that dedicated GPS are battery hungry as well?.

EDIT; not sure if it’s available on Apple

you do realise that dedicated GPS are battery hungry as well?

Not really – the Garmins have a screen which can be used without a backlight, which makes the usable battery life much better.

To the OP, I’d look at an Edge Touring or an Edge 800. The 800 has been largely superseded by the 810 so there should be some good deals on it, and unlike the Touring it has a barometric altimeter (and does ANT+ if that’s of any interest)

Don’t bother with the navigation bundles, as you can get maps for free that work better than the OS 1:50k maps, particularly for on road stuff.

Creating a route is easy. There are loads of sites that can do it. I use http://www.bikehike.co.uk, but anything that can export a GPX file will do the trick. Then you plug your GPS into your computer, it appears like an external hard drive, and you can just copy the file into the Garmin\NewFiles folder on it, and it’s there next time you use the GPS.

I wouldn’t be without mine now. I was out today in an unfamiliar area, spent 5 minutes preparing a route on lots of fiddly little back roads with largely unsigned junctions, and it was great to be able to just get on with riding and not keep stopping to check my route.

You can hire them from here. £25 for a weekend or £30 a week.

you do realise that dedicated GPS are battery hungry as well?

Yep, 16-20 hours for the 800/810. With turn by turn nav it’s great

Couple of options.

The garmin edge series are very good and I’ve used them for this type of thing. I recently took a group of 11 people across Italy over 4 days in a similar fashion.

On my Edge 800 I get between 10 and 12 hours of battery depending on settings.

You can buy the edge with full uk OS mapping – this is very good. You can get it without maps cheaper but then you are stuck with the base map which is rubbish or downloading something based on open source mapping. The open source stuff is fine for road work but poor for off road in my experience. Which is in contrast from the guy above. You can view the open source mapping by googling for it!

Bikehike is a good site for preparing routes.

It may be worth checking out phone apps and seeing if you can download something that will let you save a map to your phone and then just rely on its gps function for position. You used to be able to do this with google maps for limited areas? Mapmyride might let you do this?

Back up battery packs will help with power issues. I have one of these

and it works well giving a couple of full charges for my tablet.

If you have he money the garmin was the best thing I bought for my bike. Gave me the confidence to explore further afield and made it much easier/faster/reliable than map reading.

The open source stuff is fine for road work but poor for off road in my experience. Which is in contrast from the guy above.

No, I think we agree. My experience of using the open source maps off road is that the trails are usually marked, but the classification of them is pretty hit and miss. Also, the open source maps are often a bit more accurate in terms of the exact position of the trail, as they’re often created from GPS traces.

MotionX-GPS is a decent iPhone app which supports off-line maps – useful as a backup.