Total Motorcycle Community Forums

Anybody out there using a GPS? I plan on doing a lot of touring this year and itseems like it may be a worthwhile investment. There are so many brands and models. Any favorites for cycles?

The garmin handheld is a good unit. There's probably an attachment accessory you can get to attach it to your bike somehow.

There's about a zillion garmin handhelds. I have the 60cs which is a fantastic unit. I've never bought the bracket to mount it to my bike - mostly because I usually ride on roads I already know.

The two main portable gps makers are garmin and magellan. there's also lowrance and some others but garmin and magellan dominate the market. You can learn everything you want to know about gps at www.groundspeak.com - they are largely concerned with geocaching but they devote a large part of their forums to general gps stuff. There's a lot to learn. Feel free to pm me if you have a specific question.

Who makes the 60cs. I want one for going across the country not just local touring

I'm curious at to what kind of functionality you're looking for in a bike mounted GPS. I've been using GPS since the early days in the aviation environment (obvious navigational benefits there), but I haven't been tempted to go out and get one for the bike or the cage.

I've occasionally used my aviation handheld to check speedometer accuracy on the bike, but that's about it. What sort of things would you expect a GPS to do on a bike? 95% of my riding is over familiar territory, so I don't really need a GPS to tell me which way to go. For road trips, a quick glance at a map will suffice. On those types of trips, I usually have the map mounted on the tank in some way (i.e. tank bag).

What am I missing?

Garmin makes the 60cs ~ $350 from amazon down from near $500 a year ago... but you have to spend another $100 to get maps from garmin - they are proprietary. $100 sounds like a lot, but that gives you just about every road you'd ever want to find in north america. You use a pc to load the map segments you want onto the unit - which has 56mb of memory and is not expandable. a lot of people who travel a lot go for one of the magellan units which have expandable memory - but a lot of people think they are buggy and have poor customer support (ymmv). The unit does come with a basic basemap for the whole US, but it's very basic - you'll want more detailed maps if you really want the gps to give you turn by turn instructions. The 60c (without the "s") is about $50 cheaper if you don't need a compass and baromtere. after the mounting bracket and maps you're certainly looking at $500. My two cents is it would be tough to use on a motorcycle in motion. But it would be fantastic if you just wanted to take off and go wherever you wanted - then you just tell it to tell you how to get back again and it will show you the route to take. You can spend a lot less for a gps than $500 and still get good functionality. Like all electronics, the bells and whistles cost more. But like I said before there's a lot to learn about GPS. i like this one because it's a top of the line handheld that I can use to load topos for hiking and geocaching software for geocaching and it'll also give me turn by turn directions in my car and I can easily transfer it between vehicles. If I were you I'd go read up on gps systems in general, then decide what you'd use it for and THEN pick the unit that's best for you. There are dozens of units out there if not more. It isn't a truly mature technology for public use yet though it is getting to be rapidly as the number of folks using them grows a lot each year and they are making rapid advancements. All of the units and manufacturers and individual units have their supporters and detractors and quirks. You really have to spend a bit of time on the learning curve to get the most out of it - once you get there it's worth it - for me anyway. But then again, I love gadgets.

What am I missing?

A GPS is just a map...an expensive map that shows you where you are on it and can give you directions. Why buy a dishwasher when you can just wash them by hand?

I use my gps alot in town in my jeep. It has the US phone book in it, so finding local shops and street addresses is a breeze...Houston is a big city and I've yet to memorize every street, but I'm working on it .

My mother is in town, and is borrowing my jeep while I ride the bike. Instead of giving her directions how to get home, I push a button and the car takes her there.

On trips, its great as it tells you your route, ETA, gas stations and shops/restaurants along the way. Its a useful tool if you have the cash to spend on it. You may not use it everyday, but you'll wonder what you did without it. Get one that will be easy to read with a big display but easily transferrable between any of your vehicles.

The absolute best thing about a gps is that you can explore to your heart's content without worrying in the least about getting lost. Even if you are operating away from your home base - you can just push a button to enter where you started from (i.e. a familiar road, friends house, home, hotel... whatever) and then take off - when you are done just tell your GPS you want to get back to wherever and it will tell you the best way to get there. If your gps has the autorouting feature you can ignore its advice if you don't like the road it picked for you and it will then figure out a new best way for you to get somewhere from your current location.

It's fantastic for hiking as well because you can load topo maps. You can just park on a forest service road somewhere and take off - no trail needed. enter a waypoint for where you left the car and start hiking. I wouldn't recommend this for the inexperienced though. If you get a few miles out in the wilderness and somehow break your gps you could be in for an adventure you hadn't planned on - always have a regular compass... and more importantly some basic orienteering skill.

One of the main features i'm looking for is that it talks, so you really don't need to use the map for everything. I had a friend get his tractor trailer into heavy traffic in Newark New Jersey. He was in the wrong lane to turn. He went straight and it compnesated right then for the next best turn. He said he missed the next thre turns because they were to tight to turn his rig. When he finally turned it was already sending him back to his original destination on his route. Why do I want a GPS? For reasons like that. I'm sure i'd never use it in my town for any reason, but I plan on a lot of long trips this summer going through some big cities to get there. I have been reading up on the technology, thats how I know I want one that talks. I have the money to blow 6 or 7 hundred on a unit cause I don't want the hassle of maps. Like I said why I want to use it wasn't the purpose of my post as much as what types of units others are using and how they like them.
CB360, i'm gonna check your model out tonight. I'm not a hiker so thats not a feature I care about. The most important topic you brought up was the downloading of info and the ability and cost of getting the software needed.
CNF202 What kind of system do you use?

Read the amazon reviews on the 60cs - there's over 60 of them and if you read most of them they cover about everything - the 60cs doesn't talk though. Most of the ones that talk at you or mount permanently in the vehicle are in another price category - as in a lot more money.

One affordable option that does talk at you yet is still portable and does have autorouting... is the Garmin Quest. You can pick one up for a bit more than $300 and it comes with city select v. 7 - maps for all of north america. we bought one for my boss and he absolutely loves the thing. i'm personally partial to Garmin becasue i believe their routing is a bit more intuitive. that said, there are thousands of happy magellan users out there. I like the portables - I travel a fair amount and I like to be able to load topos if i'm in Thailand and still have the capability to use it for driving a rental car when I fly to a strange city.