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A group of us are heading to finale in September for a week,mainly doing uplifts but to keep cost down I’m thinking of doing one or two days of xc riding without a guide.I can’t find a guide book on the net or detailed maps and fancy getting a gps anyway.All I’m after is something simple,easy uploading of maps and reliable for navigation off road.Ive never used one before so any advice much appreciated,I’ll be getting one second hand and my budget is about 70 quid.
thanks
Garmins are ok because you can load openstreetmap maps for free
Whichever you get, get it as soon as possible as practice using it. I've seen a few people get one for a trip, not bother learning it and then having a crap time because they spend all their time trying to get it to work, something they could have done at home. It's not difficult but they don't work as well as you imagine so it's worth practicing
Thanks for the advice,I do want to get one soon but just no idea which one to get.I was offered a Garmin Edge 500 for 50quid but then read some reviews saying it wasn’t great for navigating.
None are really good for navigating and it depends on lots of things such as the quality of the maps. My favourite way is either to upload a gpx or a route I have marked and then just follow the line rather than rely on the device to do the routing
Most important is battery life really as I like the backlight on to help me see.
You will also need to take a laptop on holiday with you for planning routes or upload the gpxs before you go. It's not so easy to do from a phone
If you get a device that supports Garmin IQ apps then you can use the new trailforks app that will let you upload from your phone but. I much prefer to use a big screen
Note that the Edge 500 doesn't display maps. That would be enough to put me off as the built in route guidance is never great off road as it really depends on the quality of maps you have loaded
Thanks once again for the info.Having a line to follow with turn notifications is all I really need,so will cheaper Garmin’s do this as long as I upload a gpx file of the route(if I can find one for some finale routes)?
I've never used one but a Garmin eTrex 10 is £75 on the Blacks website
You might want to check out the Wahoo Elemnt as well as there more phone based and as far as I can tell great for following a downloaded route.
Enjoy the trip.
James
You might want to check out the Wahoo Elemnt
They're three times the quoted budget, so probably not.
Having a line to follow with turn notifications is all I really need,so will cheaper Garmin’s do this as long as I upload a gpx file of the route(if I can find one for some finale routes)?
Sort of 🙂
Line to follow? No problems there: even an Edge 200 will give you that. The turn notifications bit is more complicated.
There are two ways you can get turn notifications. The "proper" way involves using a GPS with routing capability. Mostly these will be over your budget even secondhand, but you could get an Edge 800/Touring if you lurk on forums/Ebay; or one of the older eTrex Legend/Vista units will do (although they're quite chunky and have a less versatile mount).
The other way is by having cue points stored in the GPX file itself, which effectively just pop up a message as you approach a point. Most units will support these (the 200 doesn't, maybe a couple of other low-end Garmins too, but the 500 does as far as I'm aware).
However, because you need the cue points in the file, you can't just assume that any file you download will give you turn notifications. You may have to put them in manually, by uploading the file to something like RideWithGPS and then editing it. Not too big a deal for occasional use, but a bit of a faff if you're eating lots of routes.
Note also that if you don't have mapping, some junctions can be a bit unclear: if you have a few tracks joining each other in close proximity it can be easy to take the wrong one. That said, you should get an off-course warning shortly afterwards. If you hear it 😉
So on topic, for finale youll be fine with the edge 520 if you can find one second hand, not much memory for maps but will be enough for finale. All of the garmins will do breadcrumb mapping to a degree. Breadcrumb will be fine in finale as you will pretty easily see the routes.
Off topic, dont sweat it too much. You can pick up a map from any of the bike hotels, and you can buy the big XC map from one of the bike shops in town. For a couple of days the bike hotel map will keep you amused and the trails are easy to follow as there are markings on roads walls etc to guide you.
On a budget I’d get a second hand 705 and download the Talkytoaster mapping onto a micro SD card for it.
Second the advice on just following the line on the map when off road too!
In Fresh Goods there was some praise for Lezyne bike computers which are a wee bit over budget but not much, althoug I’m not sure if they do the nav stuff you’re after...
If you can stretch the budget to £100 I have a Wahoo Elemnt for sale. Email in profile if interested.
OP, if you're happy with "breadcrumb plus cue points" navigation, that's a steal. Rather tempted to get behind you in the queue actually 🙂
I've used a Garmin 510 with only the line, no maps, for navigating. First time was in the Lakes doing the Borrowdale Bash with a few bits of cheeky thrown in. I'd had minimal practice using it, and I'd hand-drawn the route using software on the desktop and been fairly lazy on detail which made choosing which of two routes to take when at a fork rather difficult and I kept making wrong turns. The other thing to get used to is zoom level, find a level which makes sense so that you can tie in what you can see ahead of you with the line on the screen.
The other annoying thing was it would sometimes insist I turn around and the display would stay with where I should be rather than where I was. Either an update fixed it or I changed some setting so that it only ever displayed the line. If I wasn't on or near the line then I'd see I'd made a wrong turn and where.
Practice on local routes that you're unfamiliar with. All you need once used to it.
Either an update fixed it or I changed some setting so that it only ever displayed the line.
You can set routes so that they show on the maps but you aren't actually navigating them. That's what I used to do on my 705
Cheers,everyone for advice.After reading about what nickdavies said about picking up a map when over there i think I’ll do that as it’s only a couple of days I would have needed one for.