Since half the point of this is that I prove to myself that modern dedicated satnavs are useful, I thought I’d better get the most modern option going.
It looks like Garmin are pretty picking up on this smartphone thing pretty early, and expecting them to be around for a while rather than just a passing fad. This has some support for interacting with a phone or PDA - you can send locations from your phone’s contacts to the device, and use your phone’s net connection to get weather and traffic updates and even search for places from one or two of these things called “web-sites”!
Roni reckons I’ll have thrown this off a cliff within a few weeks (we’ve got a week-long trip coming up); I think Mian’s running a sweepstake on when and why I just stick a phone on my bars again.
Anything I should know and work around or prepare for from the outset? I’ve not got a PC suitable for having issues with Basecamp and friends, so hopefully I’m okay there.
The flap wasn’t the issue, it’s the socket that I was getting at. I don’t have anything suitable for the other end of the cable so it shouldn’t be a real issue, it’s just not really helping with the whole “these aren’t old and shit” thing I’m trying to persuade myself
You said it arrived today, you do understand that when the amazon delivery person asks you to take something for next door you’re expected to give it to them not keep it
Been using the Garmin Zumo 340LM for a couple of years now. No serious issues at all and still going strong.
Take it easy with the mount, found it easy to bend one of the pins. Probably because the symmetric design makes it very easy to try and mount it upside down. Think they did update design though at some point, so dunno if this applies to yours.
BaseCamp and PC/Mac software update is good. Well worth pursuing. They release regular maps and updates, which install super easily. Bit of a learning curve to BaseCamp to get hang of how it organises routes, trips etc. but it’s fine after a couple of days playing around.
Never had hassle linking to cheap Chinese bluetooth headsets, always works fine. Pretty such mine doesn’t link to phone, so can’t comment on that side.
Just basic routing options on mine - generally a motorway route or a non-motorway route. But it has picked out and helped me discover some nice b-roads in past. That said, 90% of longer twisty routes I prep in BaseCamp first, the download to it. Basecamp is also good for browsing past travelled routes that are automatically recorded.
Mine has got a new-er mount that’s still compatible with the old apparently, but I’ll keep that in mind Bizarrely the unit can only do landscape mode so hopefully I’ll not find myself trying to put it in upside-down too much. Either way, I’ll likely get a locking mount for it as soon as someone makes one.
Basecamp and Tyre both sound great and useful, but the way I pack/travel means I just can’t carry a laptop round with me all the time. I suspect I’ll ‘sort’ that out with a USB OTG cable to get stuff from my phone to the device. I’ve just exported a bunch of stuff from Furkot onto the device and that’s been relatively painless so far.
Basecamp and Tyre both sound great and useful, but the way I pack/travel means I just can’t carry a laptop round with me all the time.
The way Basecamp is designed, is that you setup a ‘trip’ covering multiple days, each of which you create a route for. So you basically pre-prepare everything, download it to the Garmin, then whilst on tour you just bring up day of the trip as you go. So, in theory you shouldn’t need any laptop with you or further downloading of routes whilst on tour. But, it does assume you’re super prepared and plot all this out in advance. Though you can do some tweaking of prepared routes on the fly directly on the Garmin.
Haha, yeah, I don’t even do day trips with that level of planning, let alone week-long ones!
One of the oddest things I’ve found while doing all this research is this universal expectation that you don’t do any route planning on the device itself.
Yep exactly - they’re designed for planning geeks who spend months meticulously mapping out every step of a trip. A trip that’s probably only a couple of days long…
There is a method to program on the device. I’ve not made a video about it though. Once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy. The method I used was to mark the route on a paper map fire up.the device, create a new route in trip planner and place a point on the map after every village the route went through. You can do that by choosing add point, town or city, search for the village you have marked on the map, then when you find it, select it then choose browse map and place the point precisely. You can keep doing this till your route is compete.
Bizarrely the unit can only do landscape mode so hopefully I’ll not find myself trying to put it in upside-down too much. Either way, I’ll likely get a locking mount for it as soon as someone makes one.