Last night I realised I was in for another wild goose chase ride following a very long road route on 3 pages of old motoring atlas, so binned the idea this year. And I've been doing a few rides recently where I wish I'd tracked them so I could locate the best sections a few weeks later and link them up better than using trail-memory.
A GPS would be useful.. So what's good for simple routing? I don't care about elevation, gradient, HRM functions, speed etc, simply where I am, where to go and where I've been. I want to be able to create road/off-road routes online easily then follow them, or upload a few routes and look for overlaps.

The Garmin Touring looks like a stripped-out satnav for a bike but I'm wary of being tied into one on-line mapping system if it's like having i-tunes for Ipods .. I'm more of a fan of drag and drop MP3 players.

Any recommendations?

(edit to add, I like how googlemaps lists turn by turn directions, if I could get that to show cumulative distance and follow it like ACA route cues I'd print them off and use that for road trips, but not found anything similar. ie following cues rather than a bleeping dot on a line is good, I don't necessarily want to switch off from navigation)

Have a look at ride with GPS for your printable cue sheets.
A local bunch use them for their weekly rides and the site seems to work very well, and very clear info for people to download files to there various devices too.

The link shows a ride for you to see it in action.
http://ridewithgps.com/routes/3426844

If you ave smart phone memorymap is excellent. I use it on iPhone

Ride with gps looks good, not seen that before. Thanks.
Maybe I should try some android apps for shorter rides, used to use sporttracker but poor battery life and long rides didn't work so well.

A few of us on here have Dakota 20s with bargain maps sourced from ioffer.com
Price fluctuates but it's about £150 for the Garmin, £20 for the maps and a Tenner for the mount. It runs on AA batteries. You can use bikehike.co.uk to draw a route on OS or Googlemaps (shows them side by side). This can then be dragged n' dropped onto the Garmin. It'll do road instructions with arrows and a coloured trail for off-road. There are similar models with bigger screens if you like.

Did you do the TD without GPS? Chapeau!

I managed to get a Garmin Edge 200 off eBay for £35 because they broke the mount, I then made a fix for this and it's great. Basically it's a bare bones version of my edge 500 I've been using for years, battery life is good and is perfectly designed for cycling. Used it a handful of times and worked quite well, plan to use it on the BB200.

You can use it for just tracking, giving you simple basic functions such as speed and distance but all done via GPS. You can then do breadcrumb trails. You're not really locked into software, I just drag and drop the correct file types on and off it - plenty of online tools that can help you but at the end of the day the file structures are pretty simple so shouldn't be a problem in terms of being locked into a software provider.

I really rate my etrex30, but an etrex20 would be just as good.

I plan my routes using www.bikehike.com and transfer them on with that or a copy and paste. I don't do much overlying but scotroutes from here one suggested it was doable I think

Ok, so a Garmin can do drag and drop from different route-creator sites? That sounds good. I should look up the details but was more interested in what people find works rather than the official specs.

I have started using Orux maps on my Note, as I don't want/need full GPS function really.
Very happy so far, can make a route on Bikehike et al and then download as a GPX or KML file.
In addition it can also do tracking, which I tried on a short ride a few days ago and it was pretty good, the GPS on the phone was surprisingly accurate, plenty good enough for what I want. There is also GaiaGPS for both Android and IOS, I have this on my Ipad and Ipod and it works in much the same way, though I haven't tried the tracking on it. Both apps use OSM maps, though the older version of Orux I have has OS in the menu, noticed the newer version does not!?
Gonna go and have a look at ridewithGPS now :)

Reading this thread with interest as I'm in the same boat.
Undecided on a GPS with pukka OS mapping (1:50k) which I could also use whilst mountaineering
Or ...... Try something phone based?

iPhone based on the bike (currently dabbling with sports tracker for recording routes) is alright I did find the GPS gobbled battery life, but now sorted for dynamo/USB charging as I go along. Good for recording where you have been but not able to follow a route.

Going to give the one above a try, anyone know of any others?

If there's phone signal, Orux maps is excellent. Where not, Etrex 20 has been very solid & user-friendly 'enough' (Seems all Garmin stuff is designed backwards - nothing is intuitive - and comes with a steep learning curve*)... Bikehke for drawing routes.


*

jameso wrote:Ok, so a Garmin can do drag and drop from different route-creator sites? That sounds good. I should look up the details but was more interested in what people find works rather than the official specs.

Definitely not only 'drag & drop' - quite a lot of 'export & import' too..

With routing I found I had to do a lot of learning initially to get my head round things like the difference between 'tracks' & 'routes', gpx files, kmz & kml files etc etc etc. Even tho I'd used 'regular' maps for years, none of the digital stuff was particularly intuitive or joined up( :) )IMHO. The web was my friend for a good few weeks on that front... tho probably it's that I'm not just slow on a bike ...

Seems all Garmin stuff is designed backwards

Definitely not only 'drag & drop' - quite a lot of 'export & import' too..

With routing I found I had to do a lot of learning initially to get my head round things like the difference between 'tracks' & 'routes', gpx files, kmz & kml files etc etc etc. Even tho I'd used 'regular' maps for years, none of the digital stuff was particularly intuitive or joined up( :) )IMHO. The web was my friend for a good few weeks on that front... tho probably it's that I'm not just slow on a bike ...

Useful perspective, thanks. That's what puts me off tbh, faffing with anything on a computer. User-friendly and intuitive is a priority, I have a really short attention / patience span with digital tech.

jameso wrote:Ok, so a Garmin can do drag and drop from different route-creator sites? That sounds good. I should look up the details but was more interested in what people find works rather than the official specs.

Almost. My process is to save a track from bikehike.co.uk, use Garmin BaseCamp (free download on Mac OS) to transfer to the eTrex. You can do it manually and the file structure on the GPS isn't that complicated, but BaseCamp makes it easy.

I use a Garmin 800. I like bikehike to plan routes as being able to switch between the types of maps so easily is great. Also as my garmin uses 1:50 000 maps so it's good to plan on that scale map as well, as you are at least slightly familiar with how it looked. I used to use getamap more and although 1:25000 is great for detail, some times they differ and it can make it slightly confusing.

I just export from bikehike straight to the 'new files' directory on the garmin and next time you switch it on it converts it to a .fit and adds it to the courses. Easy.

Using Bikehike it's really not that bad....


Draw route, save route as .gpx track, drag and drop whateveryourrideiscalled.gpx into the correct folder and then select it when you switch it on.

Trickiest bit is when you use OSGetamap which exports .gpx routes as opposed to tracks and the Garmin Dakota can't handle the number of waypoints so you only get the first part of a route (for me it could only handle the first 40 miles of the SDW, if saved as a track it would easily do it all in one go). I only noticed this as the last time I used it was for WRT and did each checkpoint as a different route so didn't hit the barrier....

chris n wrote:Almost. My process is to save a track from bikehike.co.uk, use Garmin BaseCamp (free download on Mac OS) to transfer to the eTrex. You can do it manually and the file structure on the GPS isn't that complicated, but BaseCamp makes it easy.

Pretty much the process I (now) use.. but it does take time to be fully savvy with all the little idiosyncrasies / bugs along the way (eg that Bikehike always saves the file as 'bikehike course' no matter what you rename it in the program & that it's probably better to edit an offroad course in Bikehilke where you have both the map & satellite in the same place as opposed to Base Camp where - unless you've bought the OS map at big £ & much faffing with 'tiles' to keep that cost down - you're stuck with the native Garmin map which is about a much use off tarmac as a chocolate toasting fork...)

Suppose I'm just posting a caveat to the notion that it's all just 'drag & drop' simple and that if you buy a GPS in the morning you'll be out happily pedalling the hills on a route you've created after lunch :)

You can save tiles for use offline with Orux and Gaia, I have several so I can run my phones in Airplane mode while out riding. As I am fairly new to this stuff myself, I went for a ride yesterday and tracked it on my spare phone, no sim in it etc. It tracked and recorded fine using the GPS and although there was no underlying map tile, once I got it home and connected to my wifi network it happily uploaded the map tile "underneath" the route as it were....pretty remote ride too, wouldn't have had a service even if I had put a sim in the phone. Not too battery hungry either really, I was quite surprised. You can set the phone to save the route as a GPX once the tracking is turned off, and save it to the phone for email etc. This is Orux by the way. Haven't tried Gaia on anything but the iPad as I have an Android phone, and it's not really that portable/mountable on a bike!!

Cheers for that Gari..definitely worth looking into. (Take it that's Orux on 'droid?)

FWIW, Garmin have told me that the Dakota is now "end-of-life". I don't know if that means a replacement product is being readied or if they've decided to ditch the smaller-screen models. Shame - I really like mine but not being able to get replacement parts (like the little rubber USB port cover) could make a difference when looking to buy.

@royAB, yes, sorry should have made that clearer

Cheers Gari.