TomTom Rider
 

Just got sent this off Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...149642-0329439

Looks nice and glove friendly but 900 bucks - not sure it's a serious conetender for AM-ing.

Chris S



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A M Handbook 5, Sahara Overland 2, dvds and desert tours

http://www.sahara-overland.com and http://www.adventure-motorcycling.com

Don't know how it compares in price to USD but Halfords (UK) have them at £499.

I have read a few reviews in Dutch magazines and websites and the conclusion was that you better spend your money on a Garmin Quest II which is in the same price range but better for bikers.
They wrote that the TomTom is a good navigator to go from A to B using the shortes route but on a bike that may not be the first reason to buy a navigator.
The also wrote the hardware to mount the TomTom is not very good and they advise a Ram mount or something like that.
Here in the Netherlands they ask 799 Euro for a TomTom Rider.

There're a lot of people saying the Quest II has a VERY slow route calculation and screen refresh.

Anyone has one and could comment on this?

Thanks
Fernando

For the guys and gals in the UK the latest edition of 'RIDE' magazine does a full comparison test of 6 GPS.

In summary the Garmin Streetpilot 2720 (£900) came 1st (with a price like that I'd expect it to) Easy to use and simple to follow. Bit bulky though.

Value for money was Garmin Quest. Cheapest on test (£400). Clear and compact, albeit a bit of a fiddle to programme in routes. The Quest 2 comes recommended as an improvement with UK and Euro street level maps. Also speed camera hotspots and easy to follow. (£590) (no mention of slow refresh)

Tom Tom rider suffered some problems on the road (advance notice of turns was not long enough.) Good clear screen though and the only one that came with all the fitting kit, although you had to be careful fitting it as the bolts rounded off easily. Headset only audible in town traffic with the volume at max.

Hope this helps a bit.
simon



[This message has been edited by notxxtz (edited 14 March 2006).]

Quest II

I find that the refresh can be a little annoying when navigating but nothing serious. It depends on the complexity of the map it has to redraw. So if you are in the middle of the city it takes a little longer to redraw than out in the country. It is a little annoying but it doesn't seem to hamper the functionality of the unit.

As to calculation time it really depends on the maps you have loaded. For example, to calculate from Calgary City Hall to my house (about 40 km away) takes less than 2 seconds when just the base map is used but it takes 18 seconds with the full City Select map loaded. From Calgary to Panama City, Panama took 1 minute using the base map but I stopped the fun (at 72% completed) after 3 minutes of calculating with the City Select map. In reality, the recalculating feature is fairly quick when on the road. So if you make a wrong turn it only takes a few seconds to recalculate your route.

Overall I thought the Quest II was the best for my purposes since it is so small that it is easy to use when back packing as well as on the motorbike. We'll find out how well the unit works in anger in a couple of weeks when we take a Florida vacation and rent a car...

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Ekke Kok
Redwood Meadows, AB
'89 R100GS
'03 R1150GS Adventure

Thanks Ekke,

I'd appreciate if you put your thoughts about the Quest 2 after this trip in Florida...

Have you used the CN8 with the Quest 2? Because people seem to complain about the refreshing screen using this set of "maps".

Cheers
Fernando

You also have a smaller memory in the North American version of the Quest 2, and I dunno if that could affect as well.

Returned from Florida and using the Quest in the real world and the refresh problem was real. A couple of times we went off route and because we continued driving while the unit was recalculating it had to recalculate again as we passed an intersection. Quite annoying.

There are ways to improve the situation though. One is the calculation methodology, we had it set to finding the best route so that means it spends more time calculating. Changed the setting to quickest and that helped a lot but it missed some really obvious routing options so we settled on quicker while navigating in the car but went to best when planning a route back at camp.

Another improvement was to turn off the automatic zoom. The unit is set to zoom in or out depending on how far ahead the next turn is. So as you approach your turn it zooms in tighter and tighter. Naturally that takes time and sometimes the display would be blank for a number of seconds while it was redrawing just at a critical time for navigating. So for slow driving I just set the zoom level at 300 metres but on the Interstate this led to more problems as the map had to be redrawn every few seconds at the higher speeds. So, zoomed out to about 8 kilometres and that seemed to work just fine.

With those changes, the slow refresh problem was reduced quite a bit but it still existed.

Ekke,

I really appreciate your feedback on this, thanks very much!

I'm just about to buy the satnav (we set off on the 19th June) and I'm between the Quest 2 and 276C...The more I read the more I get confused (following threads here, ukgser and pocketgps)!

Guess I've got some homework to do...

Cheers
Fernando