About the GPS things....

Originally Posted by Carsick

If you've got the money to spend I believe an Ipaq and a gps addon are the best way to go. I seem to remember Patch has a setup like that.
I have no clue on any of the standalone sets, though, sorry.

Yes, a mate has got an IPAQ GPS kit for about £100. He got the software pirated off a mate. As he already had the IPaq (from work), he had a full GPS system for under a ton!

It's really good, so long as you use it properly; we got lost over in Oxford due to me mis-clicking a streetname (I hit the street below) with the stylus and not noticing

Originally Posted by Jelster

A couple of other sites have referred to using condoms to keep things watertight. Hmmm, good excuse as to why they're in my wallet I guess

.

Yes, you can actually carry a couple of litres of water in them!

I just bought a Magellan Sportrak Map. It's main use is as a speedometer on my 2002 streetfighter project but I made sure I bought one with mapping capability. It has 2 megs of built in maps and 4 megs for download. Mount kits and power cables are available for it, it's water proof, back light and has a nice big speedometer...

I got it off new Ebay with software for $145.

[northwind]

Originally Posted by Jelster

A couple of other sites have referred to using condoms to keep things watertight. Hmmm, good excuse as to why they're in my wallet I guess .

That explains why they're so expensive, people preventing them from reproducing naturally

I use the Ipaq with TomTom software...paid just under £400 for it but saw a "medion" unit at Aldi for £250. £300 at pcworld. It is a stand-alone system that can fit into your tankbag's front cover so that should sort out your waterproofing issues (rather than leaky condoms)

Originally Posted by Flamin_Squirrel

[
Waterproofing - one thing I've still not solved yet. Good point.

As for easily operable with gloves on, personaly I've found this to be of lesser importance.

I have now solved this with an "otterbox". totally waterproof and mounted to the bike using Ram mount.

I have the otterbox 3600 it is a bit big really but this month they launch a smaller product designed for the new generation of PDA's. http://www.otterbox.com/product.cfm?product=178&code=NA

FWIW the PDA solution is well ahead of a purpose built solution. The gps receivers are more powerful and retain the signals better than Garmin etc and with the SD cards currently on the market you can get the majority of Europe to street level on one card.

Maps are a fraction of the price of Garmin especially if you can find one of the European maps packages that TomTom do still available (I believe that they are stopping this but I found one on the net the other day for £99:00)

Sandisk are launching a 2Gb SD Card next month which will permit the storage of the complete maps of Europe as well as half a CD collection on Mp3.

Added to this the integration of Speed camera databases and Traffic warnings the PDA solution has left Garmin about ten years behind.

A while back I was doing some research in this area. I was looking at the same set of GPS models you were. It seems that bike riders liked the C60 the best, mostly because of it's bright color display.

The Quest was an unknown, but the non-replacable battery was a big problem for those looking to pre-order one. BTW, the European version of the Quest has double the memory of the US version. Garmin told me that it was because the density of roads is higher in Europe. The quest does give verbal autoroute instructions but you'd need an external speaker for that (comes with one, but you'd need some kind of headset for a motorcycle).

I've heard that the Quest is lacking in features, especially for the price, but the voice prompting autoroute might be a good feature if you can adapt it for a motorcycle.

I ended up getting a Magelan Meridian Gold for the following reasons: It's not as expensive as the Garmins. It uses SD memory cards up to 512K. It is waterproof. It takes ordinary AA batteries. I've found that it works well but it does have a few drawbacks.

While it can hold a lot of map information, you have to break your map up into smaller segments and "manually" switch maps as you go, though I haven't actually had to do this. This may not be an issue if you are only using it in specific region. I can easily fit most of norhern california in one "region" and still have room for more maps. I'm only using a 128K memory card, also. The software that you use to load maps is pretty primitive and is copy protected, though some users have found ways of getting around the copy protection.

If you use the Autoroute feature, it only beeps when you come to a turn... and that's pretty useless on a bike where you can't hear much of anything anyway. Battery life is OK, maybe 14 hours, but you can rig up an external source.

After having used it on my bike, I'd say that it's really unsafe to have to look at the GPS while riding, especially at highway speeds. It's great for finding out where you are when you're in unknown territory, how to get somewhere (while stopped), and tracking your travels. If the autoroute beep were louder, or if you could rig up some sort of headset to hear the beep, it would be close to perfect for what I need. This was my first GPS and I didn't want to break the bank on something I wasn't absolutely sure would be useful.

Finally, they say that you should always bring a paper map along with your GPS. I've found that it's true - the paper map really helps to fill in gaps.There are also user lists fo the Meridian that can be quite helpful too.

Sorry for the long-winded reply.
-g

Originally Posted by Patch

I have now solved this with an "otterbox". totally waterproof and mounted to the bike using Ram mount.

I have the otterbox 3600 it is a bit big really but this month they launch a smaller product designed for the new generation of PDA's. http://www.otterbox.com/product.cfm?product=178&code=NA

FWIW the PDA solution is well ahead of a purpose built solution. The gps receivers are more powerful and retain the signals better than Garmin etc and with the SD cards currently on the market you can get the majority of Europe to street level on one card.

Maps are a fraction of the price of Garmin especially if you can find one of the European maps packages that TomTom do still available (I believe that they are stopping this but I found one on the net the other day for £99:00)

Sandisk are launching a 2Gb SD Card next month which will permit the storage of the complete maps of Europe as well as half a CD collection on Mp3.

Added to this the integration of Speed camera databases and Traffic warnings the PDA solution has left Garmin about ten years behind.

Nice... I take it the whole PDA + cradle all fits into the box? I've already got a mount on the bike... would I have to modify it?

I dont know about this new one. The 3600 Otterbox has a "mounting bracket" which accepts the Ram mount system do it was straight forward. The PDA fits inside it and there is a waterproof pod for the GPS and waterproof through the box connectivity as well. The whole thing is also shock proof.

The down side of the 3600 is that it was designed a few years ago for the then state of the art PDA's which were much larger so its a bit chunky and the Pod was designed for barcode readers so is not big enough for a lot of the GPS receivers (I have a Pharos iGPS which is one of the smallest).

Easy to use whilst on the bike and the box holds a pointer which I can get to wearing Pathans.

There are some pictures on this thread http://www.bikersoracle.com/gs/forum...hread.php?t=89

Well I went out and got a new GPS system. Despite looking at the quest that is excellent value for money as it comes with the European Map software I decided it was not suitable. It doesn't have a jack plug for the audio on the unit, instead you have to use the one on their cigarette lighter adaptor. So that was of no use to me as my bike doesn't have a cigarette lighter !!

So I went for the new Navman iCN 510. Better screen, easy to use software, touch screen and it has a 2.5mm jack for external audio. It cost me £439, but I think it was worth it...

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