I’m annoyed and feel like spending money on something I can live without.

What the current bee’s knees for Roady GPS that does directions, HRM, and the rest of that crap.

My irritation appears to be limited to around £250.

Pleased with my Garmin 810. I can’t see that the newer ones offer much more. Maps for road are free, courses planned on Strava are easily uploaded and then I ride them. Pleased with that.

Navigation is not great. It’s a good idea to know where you want to go before you leave!

I have an 810 and an 820. I’d spend the extra cash on an 820. Better screen. Menus are better. Auto brightness is nice. The way it manages sensors is more convenient. It’s a bit more compact. Just better IMO.

Navigation is not great. It’s a good idea to know where you want to go before you leave!

I’ve used nav by loading a route and just using the 820 to follow it, which is fine. No idea how well the “enter a postcode” style nav works.

I would agree on the nav front – just putting in an end destination and letting the Garmin find a nice route for you may not be the most efficient way of getting to your destination. I’ve found mine doggedly refusing to go over particular bridges over the Thames, resulting in huge additional mileage!

However, if you plan your route in advance the unit will follow that without complaints.

Cheers, Rich

Garmin 520 is ubiquitous at my Club

I’m interested in this but from the cheaper end. I don’t need full maps, just something to tell me where to go without having to stop to consult my phone.

However, if you plan your route in advance the unit will follow that without complaints.

The 810 use to annoy me with this. It would seemingly randomly turn on the feature where it tries to optimise your route (not sure what it’s called but I had to keep switching it back to “direct routing” or something like that.) No such problems with the 820 so far.

The 520 is good too but reckon for the few times I use maps it’s worth getting the 820. The auto brightness thing is nice too which you don’t get with the 520.

520 is nice too, but the buttons are not as easy to reach being on the edge rather than the top. I also have a 200 and a 500 which both allow breadcumb route following (which is fine too, but no map). My Garmin actually navigated better in Belgium than the UK, but it was just to “Town Centre”. all of these work well when following a GPX route already planned.

I’m interested in this but from the cheaper end. I don’t need full maps, just something to tell me where to go without having to stop to consult my phone.

Garmin 25 if you want heart rate, 20 if not. Or a used 500 for ultimate cheapiness and ability to record POWER! I really like the 500 – so much that mine is in the nicer black shiny 200 case 😳

Interesting, thanks. I can’t really justify over £200 just now but a second hand 500 sounds like a plan!

Ok, was too busy last night* to look at this.

So far 520, 820, and also the Wahoo Elmnt are on the list.

Couple of idiot questions, I have a Wahoo cadence and heart rate sensor, will that be picked up fine by a Garmin device, it’s ANT+ and BLT so I hope yes.

The Wahoo is smart phone driven, is that reliant on 4G signal to function well?

*As in busy drinking beer and eating pizza

Couple of idiot questions, I have a Wahoo cadence and heart rate sensor, will that be picked up fine by a Garmin device, it’s ANT+ and BLT so I hope yes.

Yes

Wahoo is smart phone driven, is that reliant on 4G signal to function well?

No, doesn’t even need to be connected to the phone. Has it’s own GPS.

Just buy an Oregon.

I use the Garmin 510 for road rides. Connects to all the willy waving toys. Can load TCX files so you get beeps and “turn left” type instructions but there’s no maps.

For off-road/touring type stuff I use an Oregon

do a forum search, there was a thread pre xmas about aldi doing garmin 810 crazy cheap. might be wo4rth a phone to the aldo help line. i got one myself and it is very good for what i want it to do.

aldi gps deal thread

I have the wahoo. Once you’ve set it up – with the phone – you don’t need the phone again. But you can – if you want – customize en route. Get the phone, fiddle a bit, and two secs later your new metric is on wahoo.

It will load via wifi as soon as you’ve pressed stop; get an alert from the auto link to strava generally before I’ve opened the back door.

The wahoo is much more user friendly and has a much more readable screen. The route mapping (only through RideWithGPS admittedly) is excellent, with the LEDs adding a bit of a hint.

No complaints with it at all. Battery life seems very good. Move away from the crappy garmin software.

Course, dunno what it’s like with an Android phone. Apparently not quite as good, but that’s partly as it was helped to fruition by apple.

I’m interested in this but from the cheaper end. I don’t need full maps, just something to tell me where to go without having to stop to consult my phone.

i’ve just gone with one of these Lezyne Smart Dry Caddys to mount on the stem or handlebars:

I plan to plot a route on gmaps & have gmaps text it to my phone for use later. A drop in reception could cause an issue. Also purchased a spare battery for the mobile in case i run out of power on a long day.

Just buy an Oregon.

Well, if Mon/Tue turns out to be road it’ll be touring speed and I’ll bring the beast of burden which has an Oregon mount already fitted so might borrow your GPS if that’s ok.

I’ve an 820 that I mainly use on the road. I find it pretty good once it’s set up. The ‘make me a route of Xkm in direction Y’ quite good, although normally I just download GPXs of one of the local cycle clubs and then get it to do it’s turn by turn direction thing.

The only annoying thing about it is that the map is based on Openstreetmap, which is fine apart from it’ll put you on ‘cycling friendly’ routes by preference, this means you’ll get put on anything that is a ‘cycle path’ – sometimes these are not appropiate for road bikes (e.g. muddy canal tow path). There is probably an option to avoid this that i’ve not found / looked for yet!

**** it

Urrgghhhh sploosh

And I’m done

You can ad maps to a 520, apparently

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2013/05/download-garmin-705800810.html