My old Garmin Etrex is starting to crack up- not loading routes properly, screen going off and on intermittently, buttons doing odd things. So it looks like it's time for a new one….. any recommendations?

Cheers

Joe

Where do you ride that makes you feel you need a GPS?

N-Africa? N-W Canada? W-Australia?

Blacklug ..what makes you feel you need to make smart*ss comments ? 🙄

Have you looked at the Garmin site? they do foctory replacement eTrex for fixed prices.
Otherwise it depends what you want the GPS for, I use mine to record the details of all my rides (inc. HR, elevation, speed etc. try doing that with a paper map) and I find the Edge 705 just right.

Blacklug – where do you ride that makes you feel you need a Ti bike?

Salt flats? Under water?

I don't believe the OP used the word 'need' so they might 'want' something. 🙄

GPS is great for navigating when on the bike, especially in unfamilar areas. You cover a map too quicky, so it saves loads of stopping, unfolding, checking, refolding etc……

Always take a map as back up mind, no batteries to fail there. My Geko is good for me, as I'm more concerned with the navigation than the training data.

Cheers Dibbs, that's useful, I'll check it out 🙂 Can you read grid references of your 705? How useful is the mapping?

Blacklug – Member
Where do you ride that makes you feel you need a GPS?

N-Africa? N-W Canada? W-Australia?

All sounds very tempting…. perhaps Mongolia too….

And Blacklug, tthew is right. If you regularly ride new trails, it can cut out considerable faffing time. For instance, 2 weeks ago I was up on Dartmoor checking out some new trails- it was snowing, sleeting and occasionally hailing, and the last thing I wanted to do was stop, take off my gloves and try opening a map!

Recommendations …

Depends on your budget too?

There's a few around with OS mapping now, I choose a Satmap myself as the OS mapping makes more sense to me as that's what I used before for routes, good piece of kit but expensive. I use it for tracking new routes and it's been useful when I've done new routes elsewhere in the UK and you have one of those moments where you come to a junction and you're not sure which way to go, and used it for my regular routes to see if I'm faster, slower, maintaining my (poor) fitness. Also, it has a basic world map and I've used it in Morocco, Tibet and Nepal.

But, being used to a Garmin and if you're happy with that you might as well opt for a newer version of what you are used to?

They're easy enough to take to bits & clean etc.
The screen problem is a known issue with the ribbon cable & the buttons probably just need a clean out
I've done a couple now

http://www.instructables.com/id/Garmin-etrex-H-Dissassembly/

Cheers uplink that IS useful…

This may be a better description of the process

http://californication.mtbguru.com/2005/11/20/deconstructing-the-garmin-etrex-vista/

I just got a Dakota 20. No need to pay for maps if you use mobile map maker a cool little app that down loads the OS tiles from say multimap and packages them into KMZ image overlay files which you can drag onto the GPS and use as custom maps.

Cheers for that info Geda, looking at the dakota and the 2800..( and bulking at the layout for the software!!)

😆 I see some others with a need to justify their gps.

A request for a ti frame is a big difference to gps .. no matter how geeky you may be 😆

You 'keep it real' blacklug

You're living the dream fella 🙄