I ride a '75 BMW, drive a '92 Saturn and am starting to appreciate older women more and more. Sometimes older stuff just has more to offer. In keeping with that theme, I'm really hooked on the older Garmin Nuvi series: 250, 255 etc. If you can find them, you can usually get them for less than $100 (sometimes way less) and they are quite robust. You just need to make a bit of an effort to keep them reasonably dry but other than that are very usable on a bike. The integral batteries seem to go about 2 hours. For bike use, I gutted a Garmin car adapter, stuck the guts in the headlight shell and run the wire to the handlebars.

You can find replacement batteries on Ebay for the older Nuvi series for not much and the batteries frequently come with special tools for opening the unit. At least the older ones have screws and can be opened. Some of the later Nuvi's units were sealed.

I've also discovered that the older Nuvi's have an undocumented feature whereby you can turn on track recording. They can easily store a week's worth of riding in a GPX file that can then be downloaded. I wish I had known about this feature earlier. Apparently it was a clear option in the menus of even older units, but the feature was "removed" in later firmware upgrades. Well the feature is still there, they just removed the easy access to it. But in this case, the older the firmware the better.

But my main reason not to get the latest and greatest is that OSM maps work great in the 255 that I have. I lurk on the MkGMap developers list (the software to convert OSM data to Garmin GPS use) and there is starting to be a hint of discussion about some difficulties with the new BaseCamp software and OSM. Given the quality and flexibility of the (free) OSM data and the price asked by Garmin for theirs, it wouldn't shock me if Garmin started making some moves to block OSM maps from being used on their units.

I've got two spare 255's in my closet, still in their boxes. Insurance.

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Samuel Longiaru
Kamloops, BC Canada
1975 BMW R60/6
http://thetwilightproject.net