New Garmin GPS

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redfox

New Member
Location
Bourne End, UK
Nah, it uses a built-in battery, so its not ideal for touring. Why cant they stick with AAs?
 

redfox

New Member
Location
Bourne End, UK
Brock said:
That's not for touring. That's for race training surely.

Maybe, but as this was posted in the touring board I thought it fair to point out the touring limitations. I would still want to be able to carry spare batteries even on a day ride.

Anyway, for $500 (so presumably around £500 over here) it should do everything!
 

Brock

Senior Member
Location
Kent
Sure redfox, I wasn't criticising your criticism honest! Just agreeing with it really.
It would be lovely to see a GPS designed specifically for cycle tourers, but that definitely isn't it. :ohmy:
 

Road Fiddler

New Member
Its not uncommon for people in out of the way places to use rechargeable GPSs, Laptops and Sat phones with just the aid of Silva roll up solar panel. There is no reason why they could not be used on the bike (other than cost), in fact i think they would be perfect.

I am amazed no one has come up with an on bike charger quite honestly. Has no one producing hub/bottle dynamos chargers. I know Motorola and Ipod have there on bike chargers.
 

Road Fiddler

New Member
I thought someone must have come up with the idea already
 

andrew_s

Legendary Member
Location
Gloucester
Andy in Sig said:
My bottom line on this would be, can you get 1:50,000 mapping for anywhere in Europe for it?

No, it will use Garmin Mapsource data just like all the others.

Garmins display vector data - lines joining positions defined by coordinates.
1:50,000 data like memorymap is raster, which is a picture just like a photograph or a scan of a paper map.
Raster maps just aren't suitable for use on a GPS that may be required to hold data for large areas and be displayed at a wide range of scales

Vector data can be drawn at any size without loss of information.
The only limiting factor is that things get too small and crowded together if you display too large an area on a small screen. This can be overcome by turning off irrelevant detail, so you don't have residential roads and small lanes shown when you are looking at a scale suitable for planning a route between towns.

Raster data is just coloured pixels, lines only existing as pixels of the same colour next to each other. You can see all the information at a zoomed in level, but as you zoom out you end up trying to fit several map pixels onto one screen pixel. All you can do to decide what to show is to look at the colours of the (eg 4) pixels that make up the single screen pixel, so if 2 are blue and 2 are white, you pick blue, but if 1 is blue and 3 are white, you pick white. Once you've zoomed out too many times, the white background ends up dominating and lines break up.
Looking at MemoryMap on my PC, at maximum zoom 1 screen pixel = 1 image pixel, and is 5mx5m on the ground, with the 1km grid lines appearing about 10cm apart. Each time I zoom out, 4 pixels are merged into one and the apparent distance between grid lines is halved, with 5 zoom steps until the grid lines are about 3mm apart. By this time anything that was originally narrower than an A road (16 pixels wide) has pretty much disappeared.
Using MemoryMap, you just switch over to a separate set of maps (1:250,000).

To view raster data usefully at the same range of scales that you see on a GPS, you would need about 4 separate sets of maps - eg 1:625,000, 1:250,000, 1:50,000 and either 1:10,000 or possibly 1:25,000 (based on OS scales). A 20x20km jpeg of 1:50,000 is about 7 Mb, 10Mb if you store the pyramids for multi-resolution display (4 pix -> 1) rather than trying to do it on the fly. 1:25,000 will be 4x that per sq km. If you start adding up what's required, you end up with about 1.25 GB for a 100km x 100km area, which is about the smallest area that would be useful for cycling.
Contrast that to the Garmin vector data, where you can get the whole of western Europe in the same amount of storage.
 
Why isnt' it ideal for touring? I've got an Edge 305 and the charger for it weighs nothing and takes up hardly any space. If you're going somewhere without plugs you can now buy USB chargers which run on AA batteries so the built in battery isn't an inherent limitation...
 

andrew_s

Legendary Member
Location
Gloucester
Kirstie said:
Why isnt' it ideal for touring? I've got an Edge 305 and the charger for it weighs nothing and takes up hardly any space. If you're going somewhere without plugs you can now buy USB chargers which run on AA batteries so the built in battery isn't an inherent limitation...

1) Charging required. Would you be happy leaving it plugged in to the wall in a YH dorm whilst you sent the evening down at the pub? Overnight charging doesn't avoid the problem - the plug could be at the other end of the dorm next to someone else's bunk. Or there's camping tours.

2) Battery life, even if you can keep if charged, is a bit on the short side. You've only got to forget to turn if off when you stop for a leisurely lunch and you could find yourself caught short.

3) Poor for navigation. OK for following a pre-defined route, but fairly useless otherwise. Who wants to stick rigidly to a preplanned route for a whole tour?
If you have paper maps, but get lost, it won't tell you where you are (twowheelsgood's plea).

The only advantage over an Etrex or similar is that you can record heart rate and cadence, if you are interested.
 
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