Looserlama
Regular
- Location
- Ontario, Canada
Hi!
I'm planning a fairly long bike trip across Europe this coming year. It'll be somewhere between 5000km-6000km, and as such I would like to invest in a good reliable GPS. (I already have plenty of paper maps to sort through for physical backups or general overview of our route, but when it comes to the day by day navigation while biking I would really like a GPS)
From touring forums and other reviews I've settled on the Garmin 64s as being a very good option. So I was looking for peoples help/advice on the following:
1. Is this a good and reliable option?
- If you advise another one, why do you think it is better?
- Do you have any major issues with this model?
Note: the price of ~$300.- USD is fine with me, I probably wouldn't want to go much higher though
- I know that we'll be changing our route sometimes while on the go, and I've heard that this GPS works relatively well for uploading files from your smart phone, have you found this to be true?
2. I'm very new to this, so this might be a stupid question: We've obviously not planned out our route to the last detail, but we do know the main cycle routes we would like to follow. For almost all of these I've found .gpx files which I believe store the routes?
I was wondering if the 64s is compatible with .gpx files?
- On the website in it's specifications it says it's compatible with Garmin Custom Maps, but it doesn't seem to mention .gpx files anywhere.
- They also mention some way of creating KMZ files from other files, which seemed somewhat confusing to me. I was hoping to be able to literally just download the .gpx files directly onto the GPS or an SD stick and have the GPS be able to read them as is. So is that possible?
Thanks for any and all help you can provide me with! Just getting responses for either of those questions would already be amazing!
I'm planning a fairly long bike trip across Europe this coming year. It'll be somewhere between 5000km-6000km, and as such I would like to invest in a good reliable GPS. (I already have plenty of paper maps to sort through for physical backups or general overview of our route, but when it comes to the day by day navigation while biking I would really like a GPS)
From touring forums and other reviews I've settled on the Garmin 64s as being a very good option. So I was looking for peoples help/advice on the following:
1. Is this a good and reliable option?
- If you advise another one, why do you think it is better?
- Do you have any major issues with this model?
Note: the price of ~$300.- USD is fine with me, I probably wouldn't want to go much higher though
- I know that we'll be changing our route sometimes while on the go, and I've heard that this GPS works relatively well for uploading files from your smart phone, have you found this to be true?
2. I'm very new to this, so this might be a stupid question: We've obviously not planned out our route to the last detail, but we do know the main cycle routes we would like to follow. For almost all of these I've found .gpx files which I believe store the routes?
I was wondering if the 64s is compatible with .gpx files?
- On the website in it's specifications it says it's compatible with Garmin Custom Maps, but it doesn't seem to mention .gpx files anywhere.
- They also mention some way of creating KMZ files from other files, which seemed somewhat confusing to me. I was hoping to be able to literally just download the .gpx files directly onto the GPS or an SD stick and have the GPS be able to read them as is. So is that possible?
Thanks for any and all help you can provide me with! Just getting responses for either of those questions would already be amazing!
