An especially good reason to use GPS - if you're only going to follow paved roads. There's almost no detail maps for cities - ones that show the entire city instead of just the detail for "central".

Using GPS to find your way through any city does make it worth it. In much of CA and SA, there's not a lot of road signs, the streets are never straight - they wind around and its easy to loose track of your north/south orientation - and the main roads have a habit of "disappearing" into neighborhoods. Just zoom out so you can keep an eye on the highway you want to exit on, keep following the bigger city streets that take you in the direction of the highway out the other side of town and - "no problema"!

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quastdog
Chiang Mai, Thailand

A GPS is very usefull in big cities but is is also safer on the open road because you don't have to look away from the road at the map in your tank bag. (A member of our GoldWing club had a fatal accident because he did not saw the traffic jam while he was looking at the map and ran into the stopped car at the end of the traffic jam)
I have my Tomtom on my handlebar, next to my left mirror so I can see it while not looking to far away from the road before me.

I never do detailed route planing. I just choose some cities and go from one to the other, telling the Tomtom to avoid freeways/take the shortest route
That almost always brings me on nice secondary roads that I like.
If it is time to fill the tank, I let the Tomtom show me the nearest gas station. The same with banks and hotels.
I did travel in the US, in South Africa and all over Europe without a GPS with no probelms but now I have one, I would not like to be without it. (But I always carry some paper maps too, as a backup)

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Jan Krijtenburg

My bikes are a Honda GoldWing GL1200 and a Harley-Davidson FXD Dyna Super Glide

My personal homepage with trip reports: https://www.krijtenburg.nl/
YouTube channel (that I do together with one of my sons): motormobilist.nl

I think its all down to personal preference rather than usefulness. I enjoy planning routes that will best suit me and using navigation skills to follow them, and getting as far away from cities and "safety nets" as possible is the main reason I travel, so for me its maps every time.

Just think how much fuel, food, etc. a few hundred quids-worth of gagdet can buy!

Ever the frugal one ( cheapskate if you like) I concur with Lew &Anita.
How much dough is really involved in getting these electronic on-board video games to work ? First you have to buy the basic gizmos to carry along, then no doubt it starts to pile up with the investments required in all the various regional map programs, the computers needed to reprogram all this stuff for your particular tastes in routes etc. etc. the newest upgrades. And then the computer skills you need to run all this stuff of which I have zilch and no desire to get into either, - more time and $$ better spent actually on a trip.
Then the question of who programmed all the stuff no doubt including their particular bias as to where the gas stations, services etc. are that they favor or get sponsorship from .
Unless one is really exploring into unpopulated roadless dangerous tracts , or on a paid commercial night run where speed and acuracy are important I rweally can't see much purpose in gettting such electronics.
There is entertainment in just wandering and exploring , budget plenty of time to enjoy it with a basic or detailed paper map

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http://advrider.com/index.php?thread....207964/page-5 then scroll down to post #93

Why so negative?
All GPSs can be turned off if you want to ! You could even throw away your maps, to get the real adventure. And throw away your compas and take a sextant ;o))

Maps,compass and GPS are all means of navigation, you only have to decide how good a navigation you want:
1:100.000 maps or 1:20.000 ?
A big compass with compensation or a small compass on your watchband or a sextant?
30 papermaps or 2-3 overviewmaps and a GPS ?

You can buy extra gas for the GPS money, but then you could also save gas by using the GPS.
You could buy the GPS for the money saved on maps.
You will really appreciateit, that dark evening at 9pm in the rain, when it shows you the way to the next lodge ) or when you find that little single track that'll take you into to the bush faraway from the mainroad(and hopefully back again)

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Poul
May you enjoy peace and good health !

Certainly a GPS is a useful too. Is it a mandatory tool to travel, hardly. Lewis and Clark didn't need one.

It is also a toy. Bored and want to take a ride? It can invent your own personal Poker Run. Log in a destination at whatever mileage you want. Adjust the paramatures to the kind of roads you want to travel, calulate. If if comes up with roads you have already traveled, do custom avoids, so that it will calulate another route.

Now you can go to cousin Martha's house on roads that you didn't know existed and that you hadn't traveled.

If you get tired of looking at the screen, do what a previous person already said, turn it off.

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Sam Jones

did any one tried to use a nokia n95??

i have one, i cannot afford to buy a new gps system but i can afford a gps reciver....i want to do argentina to california....i'd like to have it for main direction, then turn it off and explore and then back on when i don't know where to go.