There’s a number of features of a satnav that seem really obvious, yet many or most don’t have them. This is another conversation I keep having, so here’s my list. If you’re building a satnav, please steal these ideas!

Rest-stop preferences

Let’s say you’re travelling to Edinburgh from Frome and your fuel and comfort ranges are 200 miles and two hours respectively. You like Costa Coffee and want to have lunch at a gastropub with vegetarian options.

My satnav could know these things about me (comfort range, coffee and lunch preferences) and plan the whole route for me, without my having to research lunch stops near plausible routes.

Near-home silence

I almost never need satnav navigation within around 5 miles of my house; it’d be great for it to be able to automatically silence its guidance (though keep showing information on the screen) for this bit, where I frequently am not doing exactly what the satnav thinks in any case.

Awareness of junction layout

When my satnav tells me I have to take the third exit at the roundabout in twelve miles I don’t need to think about it until I see a roundabout coming, at which point I can look down, see which exit, and take it.

When it tells me I have to turn left in twelve miles, I could approach it in the same way as the roundabout if I knew it were a T-junction.

I’d like my satnav to distinguish between junctions that I will see coming, and those that I need to keep an eye out for.

Warning of speed limit changes

It’s very normal for a satnav to warn when there’s an upcoming speed camera, and also to warn when I’m exceeding the speed limit. It feels like an obvious and constructive addition is for it to be able to warn when the speed limit is about to change, too. Apparently some Garmins can do this.

“Follow signs to Penzance”

When a human is giving directions, often we’ll think in terms of which signs to follow. The visual display of many satnavs hints at what to look for on the sign, but for some reason the voice directions don’t, and instead they say things like “Take the fourth exit onto the ay one thousand two hundred and forty one”. If there’s a big town up that road, why not mention it?

I’ve spent a long time using various Android phones and apps to navigate on a motorbike, and mostly been unimpressed with dedicated satnavs. I’ve written a not-unbiased comparison of dedicated units with phones and generally while I’m not completely satisfied with the app offerings, they do seem better than using a dedicated unit.

I did, though, find myself with a surprise £350 and thought I’d figure out what the fuss is about; I bought a Garmin 346 LM in September 2018 (shortly after its release) and here I’ve noted down my first impression, my opinion after using it for its first week-long trip, and again about ten months later. I’ve been editing this ‘backwards’ so that the most-recent opinion is at the top.

In conclusion

It’s now September 2020 I’ve been using this for a couple of years during which there’s been many one-day rides, fewer extended trips, a bunch of trail riding, an awful lot of routine “take me to this postcode”, 3 months going to and around Poland, and I think I’ve formed a proper opinion.

It’s in a box on a shelf and hasn’t come out for a few months. I don’t benefit from using it over my phone.

The good

Contrary to my initial assumptions, there’s some things it does well

• The mounting bracket is very good – one-handed fitting or removal of the unit, and it’s obviously always automatically charging. It comes with a complete RAM mount.
• As promised, the screen does not go bonkers in the rain; combined with the powered mount you don’t need to think about the rain at all.
• It can be set to always track your route, so if the device is on you don’t need to think about whether to start tracking or not.

The not-so-good

There’s also a few things that are good ideas that just feel a bit unfinished; it’s not-as-good as the competition but does still function:

• Perhaps most surprisingly, it’s bad at showing maps. It takes a long time to render maps (such as when scrolling or zooming), the image quality  of the mapping is poor (presumably a function of the low screen res) and the density of information makes it hard to recognise which area is being looked at. The Talky Toaster maps resolve the last of this, but at the expense of proper routing – you cannot show one set of maps while navigating with another. Here’s a video showing how long it takes to plot a 50mi route: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2ou4yAVZn0
• There is a Garmin phone app which allows you to send points to the device from your phone, so you can find a POI in your satnav of choice, or using Google maps, and ‘share’ it to the Garmin. The process is clunky and only mostly-reliable. It does work, but it feels more 2004 than 2019. It also requires the phone have a mobile data connection for some reason. An update to the unit allowed for the sending of GPX files over bluetooth.
• The search is still leftover from the ’90s. The norm for satnav apps is to have a search box into which you can enter a postcode, or an address, or the name of a business and it’ll just find it. The garmin has no such thing, and you instead need to navigate to the “postcode” box, or  differently to the “City” one to enter a whole address, or open “Foursquare” to search by business. There is something that looks like it will just search everything, but I’ve never managed to use it to find where I’m going and I’m still not sure what it’s actually supposed to be for.
• It’s not clear what the difference is between searching ‘Foursquare’ or ‘Tripadvisor’, but many things are in both, and many things are also only in one or the other. Quite a lot of POIs are in neither; mostly I transcribe postcodes from my phone.
• Garmin’s way of routing using specific roads is using a “shaping point”. When you’re in the mode for adding these to a route you can’t zoom in as far as you can in other modes, which is frustrating when what you want to do is put a point at a specific part of the map. There’s also no confirmation when you add a point – it immediately starts calculating the route – which is frustrating with the mix of poor zoom level, poor screen quality and fat fingers.
• There’s a relatively-useful fuel tracker, where you set a tank range and it can warn you when you’re at only 10% or 15% or whatever of fuel-range left. When this is on, though, every time you start the bike you get a full-screen warning telling you that it is strictly only for bike use and not car use, which you have to tap on to close. The only way to see the currently-remaining fuel range is to add it to the navigation screen, but in that case it’s only populated when the device has a satellite fix,  so you cannot consult it while indoors at a cafe planning the next leg of the trip.
• One of my favourite functions of CoPilot is the ‘On Route Alerts’ which means you can have an icon display on the app when there’s a POI in one or more of your chosen categories within 50 miles, and you can tap on it to route to it. I set that to show petrol stations and if that’s not displaying by the time my fuel range countdown reckons I’ve ~75 miles left I’ll pull over and find a petrol station. I was expecting Garmin’s “Up Ahead” feature to be this, but it isn’t: it cannot be set to only display things on-route so there is no way to use it passively – you always need to tap through the menu to find out where the thing is. It also can’t be set to show only petrol stations, you must set three categories.
• It doesn’t automatically-adjust the screen brightness, which I probably only find surprising because most phones can do that and it seems weird to need to find the brightness setting manually these days.

The Bad

• There’s some sort of Garmin-specific GPX or something. I don’t know the details, but GPXes that are produced by things other than Basecamp and work in other navigators frequently go a bit wrong. You won’t know this when you load the route, but at some point during the day it’ll become a line of flags.
• It can’t be set to work in portrait mode, only landscape, which is odd on a device whose main purpose is to show what’s coming up.
• The maps are out of date – there’s a series of junction changes in Central London that predate this device existing by several years, and are not represented on the latest maps. The device is best ignored when navigating around London (and presumably other large cities?) and I don’t know what to recommend to people who don’t know their way round there.
• When you plug in the USB cable, the device will count down 20 seconds before presenting itself to the PC. There is no way to skip this.
• Converting from a GPX track to Garmin’s internal idea of a route can take between 30 and 60 seconds for a 100mi route with four or five waypoints, during which the device can turn itself off because it thinks it’s not being used unless you tap on the screen to keep it awake.

First Trip

(October 2018) I went round a bit of the TET and used the Garmin as my main navigation tool for it. The idea was to just follow the GPX downloaded from www.transeurotrail.org and follow it, occasionally routing off it to find things like petrol stations.

The Garmin is very good at drawing a line on a map, which is all it can reasonably do with a GPX that involves trails; even with the Talky Toaster OSM maps it was very unreliable at turn-by-turn on the trail. I wasn’t comparing directly (and I’ve never ridden those trails before) but it felt much less useful than Locus Maps’ off-road navigation.

While the Garmin Connect app lets you send locations to the satnav, you can’t send routes (this was added in a later update to the device). The only reasonable way to plan routes mid-trip is to use a USB OTG cable and/or micro-sd card reader. The unreasonable-but-expected way is to just carry a laptop with you. Basecamp also needs a mouse, since you need the scroll wheel to zoom.

I tried using the tools I’m used to (Viewranger and Locus Maps on Android) to create GPXes and send them to the Garmin to create on-road routes but it always complained that there were too many “waypoints” and offered to convert them to “shaping points”. I don’t know what the difference is, but often I seemed to get the right sort of routes, though I don’t know how reliable this is.

So, generally, I stuck to having it just draw the GPX route and follow it by keeping an eye on the screen, which is fine at dirt-bike speeds. I did try to use it to find things to use (petrol stations, cafes, etc.) and it seemed strangely bad at this – it was always faster and easier to use my phone and either transcribe the postcode – so I think I must have missed something, and will read the manual when I’m back.

I think that most of the obvious failings of the device – that you can’t really use it for viewing maps because the screen resolution is so poor – is probably explainable as a result of it needing to be a resistive touch screen, and those having a poor resolution. I’ve not really researched it but I want to believe there’s good reason my £350 navigation device is so bad at navigation.

I can now see myself using this for trail riding and off-road biased trips where I can create a GPX route and send it to the device and have it drawn on the map. I haven’t yet worked out how I’d make it work on an extended road-riding trip where I’ll need something less prone to reinterpretation than a GPX route, but I haven’t yet looked.

Second Impressions

(September 2018) I’ve resolved to try to not have fully decided how good an idea this was until at least post-Christmas, but from a first week-and-weekend’s riding (some commuting, two blood runs and a day’s errand-running) this is better than my phone at:

First Impressions

It’s 20th September and it’s arrived!

Out of the box, first impressions are not great; they’re still using the USB socket that’s so old that I know it as “the one GoPro still use”, and I don’t even have a GoPro (or any of those cables):

The bracketry is all easy to fit and the lead’s surprisingly long and thin; the 12v/5v step-down box is partly along the wire so it’s easy to have that hidden away under the plastics.

I immediately tried to set it to portrait mode but can’t find that in the menu, might have to actually read the manual!

Buying a dedicated satnav

I misunderstood a bonus scheme and have £350 that I didn’t expect to have. I intend to use this to figure out what I’ve been missing all these years by avoiding dedicated satnavs.

The two brands that make bike satnavs are TomTom and Garmin. TomTom’s cannot be loaded up with a GPX file that goes off-road so I can’t go with one of them, even though they look more polished. Garmin it is!

There’s three Garmin lines – the Zumos are their road bike devices, have the widest selection of features and are the most-modern; the Montana is specifically aimed at off-road riding; and the Monterra is actually an Android device and so may solve all my problems.

The Monterra is an Android 4 device (Android 5 came out in 2014; 4 years ago at time of writing; 8 is current) so even if the apps I like now do work on it, it’s likely they will stop at some point in the future. This was clearly Garmin’s experiment with Android, and they’ve sadly decided to not keep it up.

The Montana is the one everyone recommends, because it’s got an ‘off road’ mode and an ‘on road’ one. The off-road mode doesn’t appear to add anything the Zumo’s don’t do; it’s not any more aware of rights of way than the road-mode one and is still largely used to display GPX routes. The on-road mode is much more primitive than that found on the Zumos. It looks like the OS maps for the Montanas can be loaded onto the Zumos.

The Zumo can be loaded up with an off-road map (courtesy of TalkyToaster, who is recommended for the Montanas over Garmin’s mapping anyway) and can have a GPX file displayed over the top. While you can trivially switch between off-road and on-road on the Montana, it seems you can do similar on the Zumo just by changing the display mode for the map. It’s also got the much-better road mode, and the modern ones have some sort of smartphone syncing.

I’m going to get a modern Garmin.

Numbers

Equivalent parts

The brake pads are the same (both front and rear) as a Husky 701

Footpegs are compatible with the XT250 (08-18), YZ/WR 125/250/500 (91-96), YZ80 (91-04), XTZ750 Super Ten (89-18) and Husky TC85: https://pivotpegz.com/search?q=PP-16

“What tools do you carry” is something that’s come up a few times on forums I’m on recently, and the raft of issues at the Taffy last week vindicated my tool selection :)

On any ride that I think about, I take my tool roll. This is generally on the Tiger 800 or WR450, but other people break down, too, so aside from the spark plug tools there’s nothing bike-specific.

The photo on the right is what’s in the little pouch:

In the roll, left-to-right:

• Small philips screwdriver (fits the battery cover on the multimeter, and most little electronic things)
• Side cutters & 8″ adjustable spanner
• 8 & 10mm allen keys
• 1.5mm-6mm allen key bit set, torx bit set
• Motion Pro spark plug tool (16mm for the Tiger, 18mm for the WR) and a generic front axle tool. The spark plug socket is 3/8″ drive, but comes with an extension that accepts a 1/4″ drive. I use this to drive the axle tool. The Tiger uses the 17mm hex drive on the axle tool.
• 8-22mm open spanner set across two loops
• 5-14mm 1/4″ sockets
• Pen-type multimeter – I only got this one because it’s what I could get hold of when I needed one; it’s button-battery powered but I’d prefer an AA or USB-chargeable one.
• Toothbrush
• 1/4″ t-bar drive, with bit driver on the end
• two 1/4″ extensions and a 1/4″ universal joint
• Magnetic picker-upper-tool and a metal punch
• Feeler gauge, pen and (underneath them) a small set of tweezers

In the little pouch, that’s:

• Lead for the multimeter
• Chocolate-block connectors
• A length of two-core wire
• UHU glue
• Liquid gasket
• Sugru
• Tuff Tape – brilliant waterproofing repair tape for anything textile
• A tin of bolts (lots has been added/removed though)

There’s also usually a couple of 25mm jubilee clips, but I’d just used them prior to taking that photo. And there used to be a spare battery for the multimeter, but I’ve used and not-replaced that, too :)

You can also see the Stop-n-Go puncture repair kit in the background below; that lives in the US5 along with the tool roll. It’s very easy to pack the tool roll to be too-big to fit in the US5; this was all pared down last year in order to easily fit into it.

The tool roll is a Kriega one and while it’s great, the Enduristan and Mosko Moto ones both look better to me (though I’ve used neither). I’ve had this for about three years it’s worn *really* well though – some of the elastic’s a little less tight than it was before, but it’s almost as good as new.

Under my seat, I’ve always got this lot:

In an order that will hopefully become apparent, that’s

• Mini (RAC-branded) compressor (with leads above it)
• Pack of breathalysers wrapped in plastic and insulation tape (from a France trip)
• Another generic front axle tool
• Spare brake and clutch levers (OE, from before I put the short ones on)
• 22mm and 27mm Spanner – the 27mm undoes the rear axle nut, 22mm the front axle tool
• Park ‘big’ Allen key set
• Leatherman Surge
• Cable ties
• Cable repair tin (with a bunch of fuses dropped in)
• Insulation tape
• Halfords Motorbike Jump leads
• Spare clutch cable

There’s also an OBD/ELM reader that I always have, and use either the Torque Lite or Piston apps on my phone to read the error codes.

This stuff all fits in a bit like this:

On the left, the Motobatt battery is lower than the OE one by enough that the compressor fits on top of the battery (only with the seat in the higher position) and its strap. I wedge the front axle tool in under there, too. The brake & clutch lever are stuffed under the intake, and the insulation tape and cable repair stuff just kicks around by the fuses. Normally the OBD reader’s either in there, too, or plugged in.

The clutch cable fits under the bracing arm with the VIN on it (you can see it poking out from the right in the left photo) with both ends disappearing off under the tail (which is also where the breathalysers, and cable-ties are stuffed). The Park Tool and Leatherman fit under that bar, the 22/27 spanner behind one of the clips on the side and the jump leads sit under where my chain normally goes.

Here’s a load of info about the Tiger 800. I’ve got a 2012 one, so this is mostly about that shape, but I’ve noted where I know things are irrelevant to the new ones. Expect this to change as I find things. :)

I’ve a manual, data sheet and service schedule for the bike (pre-2015), here:

• http://avi.st/s/Tiger_800_Service_Manual.pdf
• http://avi.st/s/Tiger_800_Data_Sheet.pdf
• http://avi.st/s/Triumph_Service_Schedule.pdf

And, thanks to Matt McLelland, there’s a manual for the 2016-on ones here:

• http://avi.st/s/Tiger_800_post-2015_Service_Manual.pdf

If you’re looking for exploded diagrams and genuine parts, Fowlers are good for those. World Of Triumph also have exploded diagrams, but they use their own part numbers and don’t warn you of things not being in stock before you order them.

Muddy Sump is generally taken as the go-to for tutorials on how to work on the bike. He’s also a roving mechanic, who’ll come to your house and fix your bike (in the UK).

I don’t know how to tell which OBD readers work on the Triumphs, but what I use is apparently a ‘mini ELM327 OBD2 v1.5’. I’ve heard that OBD v2.x readers will not work, because the Triumph ECU doesn’t support the negotiation. I use the Torque app on my phone to read the data.

I’ve replaced the mirrors on mine with natty folding ones that Wemoto reckon are for a KTM 950. They solve more problems for me than the fantastically expensive Double-Takes, and only cost £15.

It’s a great bike for all the reasons the reviews generally go on about, but there’s a couple of nice little touches that are often missed:

• The XC and roadie cockpits are interchangeable, so you can raise/lower the bars by swapping risers, and get the same-shaped wider or narrower bars by swapping those. Tiger 1200 bars are a common switch, too.
• It is approximately balanced on the centrestand with no luggage – you can stably tip it on to either wheel, and can remove either wheel without needing anything to prop the other end up.

Numbers

Common Problems

It’s not without its flaws, though. Here’s a list of issues I’ve had/noticed, hopefully in descending order of bad-ness:

• The starter tends to fail relatively quickly (20-30K miles). The 675 engine uses the same part, and Speed Triple ones are often cheaper than those from another Tiger. The problem is the brushes wearing out very quickly, and it looks and feels like a flat battery. The problem, really, is high load (from the poor contact) rather than a flat battery. Not-fixing this for a bit does tend to ruin the battery though. Generally, this is more of a problem on warm engines; left for a couple of hours (or overnight) mine would start immediately.
• The throttle idle stepper motor stops working if it gets excessively dusty, and it’s not the sort of thing you normally clean. It’s basically the replacement for the idle screw on a carb, and there are people who’ve converted this to use the Daytona’s manual adjuster. It’s easiest sorted with the tank and top of the airbox off (do it when changing the air filter), but you can get a solvent spray on it without taking the tank off when you know where it is – I doused mine with GT-85 at about 20K and as of this writing (60K) it’s been fine. It doesn’t stop the bike working, just means it doesn’t idle. The stepper-motor doesn’t exist on the post-15 bikes (the three-letter ones, XCX, XCA, XRX, XRT) so can’t be a problem there.
• The stock suspension on the roadie is terrible off-road (really over-damped) and the XC’s variously regarded as a bit better or sorted. Andreani make a cartridge kit for ~£500 (brexit might change this) which adds adjustment, and completely sorted it out for me; they’ve no UK importer so I bought from Italian Ebay. The WP stuff on the post-15 bikes is generally regarded as sorted.
• There’s a load of stuff hanging out the front of the engine at the bottom, which is a bit of a dirt-collector and makes it all a bit likely to rot (hence the jubilee clip). R&G will sell you a mesh protector for it, but that’ll only stop rocks, really. It’s worth covering the jubilee clips in inner-tube, and generally keeping all that clean. The XC’s bashguard is much more protective, but the whole area does still get dirty.
• The main fuse is underneath the battery, which makes it tricky to replace on an unlit road in the dark when it’s raining etc. The ancillary fuses are easy to get at (under the rider’s seat, by the battery) and there’s gaps for spares. The main fuse is a normal car-sized 30A blade fuse, the rest are micro blade fuses.
• If you blow the headlight fuse, the bike won’t start; I think this is part of a ‘safety’ circuit.
• When refilling the coolant, be really patient and do all the burping, and still expect airlocks. I don’t know why, but the bike seems prone to them. Also, don’t forget about the bleed screw on the top-right of the radiator.
• There’s basically no sealing of the underseat area – it just fills with mud if you ride in the wet, and with dust if you ride in the dry. It’s also possible to eventually drown the battery and main fuse like this so you need to check this (and clear the drain hole) periodically; the relays are on the way down for the mud and dirt, too, so it’s worth cleaning those, too. Mine drowned after 56K of neglect.
• The clutch cable rubs on and eventually through the upper fork leg. I’ve heard of people getting these replaced under warranty. and of other people being refused it.
• The rear shock linkage is the lowest point on the bike, just sort-of dangling there waiting to get twatted by a rock. I’ve not seen a bashplate that’ll protect it.
• The downpipes sometimes rot really quickly (mine had holes in at 45K); Triumph seem aware of this; mine were replaced under (but out of) warranty.
• Nobody makes a folding rear brake lever for it
• The bit of the frame that sticks out the front and holds the headlight unit is welded to the frame and bolted to the lights, so a front-end impact’s likely to write-off the frame.

It’s often said that a standalone satnav is far superior than a smartphone app, often for a multitude of reasons that are demonstrably wrong. Here I’ve a list of some of the available options with my opinions of them, followed by an explanation of why I think phones are only mostly better than dedicated units.

I did give in and buy a Garmin, and I’m documenting my finding out what I’ve been missing here.

(Android) Apps

There’s no technical reason for apps to be less good at the important bits than a normal satnav – smartphones have Google Maps

It’s generally regarded by anyone who has tried anything else as pretty unideal, but it’s catching up and is workable if you’re not interested in plotting a route and instead just want to go to your destination; I keep it around to use when I’m already in a town and want to find a restaurant or something, but I’d hate to have to use it to do anything substantial. It occasionally gains and loses support for multiple waypoints, but each time it supports them, if you cause it to recalculate for any reason (by going off-route) it’ll recalculate directly to the destination rather than considering all your waypoints.

Pros:

• Probably already installed
• Has every POI

Cons:

• Not great at planned routes; if you go off-course it’ll often recalculate directly to your last point, ignoring all waypoints
• Offline mapping is strange; you download small regions at a time and they are prone to expire
• No offline route-calcuation

CoPilot

CoPilot’s popular among people who plan routes with several waypoints; one of their big markets for which they make another app is caravanners and another is truck drivers.

One of the big features for me is that you can set ‘Routing Profiles’ where you can adjust the priority/cost of using each road category (dual carriageways, main roads, urban roads, small roads etc.), and save a series of profiles – I have a ‘rideout’ one that generally sticks to good roads, a ‘Dirt Bike’ one that sticks to shit roads, a ‘No Motorways’ one that does what you’d expect, and a ‘Normal’ one that’s like all the other satnavs. An other is the “POI Alerts” (which are confusingly in the “Safety Alerts & Warnings” menu); you choose a series of POI categories and a range, and a little icon appears on the map display when a matching POI is in range and on- or near-route. You can tap on the icon to scroll-through them, and there’ s a button on each to set it as the next waypoint on the current route.

I think it’s about £35 to get CoPilot premium and the UK maps. You get a few days free as a trial, during which there’s no voices for navigation (but still icons on the screen) and no automatic recalculation – you have to hit a button on the screen.

Pros:

• Designed for planned-routes; easy to create and edit routes on the device
• Handy features – route profiles, up-ahead alerts, traffic routing, speed limits etc.

Cons:

• Uses its own route format (.trp) and loading the route into CoPilot involves copying it to the right folder manually; you can’t open a .trp you emailed yourself with copilot.

Calimoto

Calimoto’s big feature is routing based on corners; it’s meant to be the ‘windy roads’ option, basically. It’s very good at that, but seems unaware of the sizes of those roads – sometimes you’ll get gravelly singletrack roads, other times it’s swooping major arteries. That said, it’s very good at not being boring. You can use a map region online indefinitely for free; you pay to get all maps, offline maps and to be able to tune the routing.

Pros:

• Easy to share routes with other Calimoto users at the beginning of a ride
• Featureful storage/search/recall of tracked rides so you can go out again
• Can open-with on a GPX file so you can use anything else to plan the routes
• Reliably produces non-boring routes
• Entirely useful without paying

Cons:

• Feels quite different in different regions; I get singletrack roads in Hertfordshire, but major A roads in Surrey, say.
• Lots of cutesey prompts that get in the way more than they entertain
• The map drawing is _really_ buggy; though the route is always drawn correctly sometimes it doesn’t match the map underneath
• Often it’ll put you into a layby or round an extra junction to get more corners; it’s worth going along with the map very zoomed out to catch and avoid these

Kurviger

Along with the kurviger.de website this is a route-planner and navigator in one. The free version only lets you opt for curvy or not-curvy routes, but on the pay-for one you can also optimise for scenery and it always seems to try to minimise the number of junctions involved. Weirdly, the subscription for the website and for the app are completely separate, but you can only really make much use of all the features if you’ve premium on both.

Pros:

• Different legs of the route can have different profiles – motorway for the first leg, then extra-curvy to lunch, then a scenic trip round to dinner, for example. Lends itself really well to touring
• QR-code sharing of routes makes it really easy in-person with other kurviger users
• Optimises for simpler routes (fewer junctions) while also doing twisties or scenery
• Kurviger.de website is really easy to use, and generates generic GPX files

Cons:

• Need premium separately on both app and website (£10/y for the site and something similar for Pro mode in the app, but I can’t find the price on their site)
• Voice navigation is a Pro feature
• Offline maps are a little clunky to set up, offline routing moreso.

Here Maps

This is excellent as a take-me-to-a-postcode app; it can’t do multiple-waypoint routing, but it much simpler and clearer than TomTom, with decent traffic estimates (when you’ve got data on) and speed camera warnings, and it’s all free. You can download the maps or use them online, and it’s completely free in either case.

Pros:

• Simple to use, feels finished & polished
• Good traffic estimates & speed limit awareness
• Lots of POIs

Cons:

• Can’t do multiple-waypoints; no way to load a route in

Locus Maps

The killer feature here is turn-by-turn navigation off-road, but this is also a featureful and functional, if a little clunky, road satnav. I use this primarily to store my PoIs (cafes, ferries, trails, covid-compliant laybys etc.) and for navigation off-road

Pros:

• Turn-by-turn off-road routing (but as a bicycle, so you need to have a high-resolution route)
• Can create, load, edit and export GPXes; it’s a pretty good GPX editor to go alongside any other satnav
• Useful for all outdoorsy things; can buy OS maps and local equivalents, or use various types of OSM map for free
• Excellent for PoI management/storing – good categorisation, exporting/importing of GPXes
• Very configurable in display and instruction

Cons:

• * Route calculation is online-only and requires the installation of a helper app (bRouter)
• Quite clunky; definitely a map app first and a satnav second
• Very poor search; best used as an app you ‘open’ a location with, rather than searching in the app itself

Some I’ve not used much recently

These all might have changed somewhat since I wrote this:

OSMAnd

Like Locus, this is map first and satnav second, but it’s a hugely better search for PoIs. I barely use it now because Locus has all my PoIs in it now, but I’ve nothing against it.

TomTom

The app’s fine; it’s like the modern TomToms (not the Rider V1/2, but the 300 series); the UI is really modern feeling, but a bit surprising and oddly lacking in features. I’ve not yet managed to plan the route I actually want to do in it, and while it’s got this neat ‘timeline’ down the right hand side of the screen to tell you where on your route any roadworks and petrol stations are it doesn’t give you any information about them (like how far away they are). It does have a really handy thing that keeps track of your average speed in average speed camera zones, though. It feels polished rather than finished, really. It’s £30/year, but you get 50miles per month indefinitely as a free trial (maps are free). Aside from the average-speed zone handling and familiarity with the TomTom interface there’s no great reason to get this over Here, to my mind.

Navmii

It’s completely free, but the user interface is pretty surprising. I know people who’ve got used to it, though, and now don’t mind it. You get one country’s map free with the install and it’s actually pretty good at points of interest, but it doesn’t do anything exceptionally well – I can’t think of a reason to use it over Here Maps.

Navigon

Garmin’s app. It’s long been famed for being atrocious, I’m amazed it’s still on the play store. But I’m also amazed people still buy Garmins. :)

Waze

is now a Google product, but it’s actually good :) For a long time its main feature was the community – it’s all about showing you user-reported cameras, accidents, and traffic. Surprisingly, it still works for that, and despite being Google underneath it seems a pretty reasonable satnav, though I’ve not used it for a couple of years.

Standalone units vs Phones

There’s not any reason for a phone to be bad at satnavving – they typically have plenty of storage space for maps, use the same or similar GPS and GLONASS chips and are at least as likely to be able to use GSM and WiFi to get better/faster fixes.

There’s some obvious benefits, too: a smartphone is more of a general-purpose computer so you’re less dependent on the way the satnav happens to implement podcasts or music, and can just use whatever app you prefer. You’re not tied to any particular route-transfer options since you can just email them to yourself, and you can use the web browser to look up addresses not already in the device. Get your calendaring and route planning right and you can turn up to ferry terminals with the booking reference appearing on your screen as a notification.

You can even use multiple satnav apps – mid-route I’ll often switch to a different one to find a petrol station or lunch stop, for example, and I use different ones for road and off-road riding, and on-road different ones for a dull commute somewhere to a Sunday blast.

Finally, the hardware’s generally better – the maps render faster, the screen resolution is much better so looking at maps when looking at an overview of the route, or modifying it, is a much more pleasant task.

That’s not to say phones are _always_ better, though weirdly when this argument comes up on forums and suchlike the people arguing in favour of standalone satnavs seem to generally cite features that are commonly available in all the apps (like offline mapping) as if they’re comparing with a quick glance at Google Maps. The things that make standalone satnavs better are those that come from the ‘standalone’ bit, and they’re almost all to do with the hardware.

If you were to design a standalone satnav for a motorbike, you’d have a bracket you can clip the satnav in with one hand, and make it such that as the satnav’s put in some sort of robust, waterproof power connection is engaged so that the thing is always charging. You’d use a screen with something to prevent glare, which works well with gloved hands (perhaps resistive, and a UI that doesn’t demand multitouch?)  and you’d probably have a series of hardware buttons in addition to whatever’s on the screen.

When using a phone, you’ll generally use a pouch or a Ram X-Grip which is only complicatedly one-handed and often obscures buttons or bits of the screen, and you’ll need separately to plug in your relatively fragile, not-waterproof USB micro lead (which has until now just been dangling about) as a second step to just mounting the device. Android’s glove mode doesn’t really work and “touch-screen compatible ” gloves rarely are and that really bright and vivid screen that’s great for looking at photos (and maps) isn’t great for glare (and a case is only going to compound that). Iphones only have one physical button, and of Android’s three, one’s famously unpredictable.

I don’t know many people who have started using a dedicated satnav in the past four or five years. I know lots of people who last used one four or five years ago (in the days of the Rider 2 and the Zumo 550) and have been put off them for life (I’m in that camp). Everyone I know who uses one now, though, used one back then.

It’s really hard to get a decent go on a dedicated satnav, though – none of the people selling them seem to think that offering test rides is particularly worthwhile – so I don’t really know much about the options hardware-wise any more, and I’ve been told that extrapolating anything from my use of a Rider v2 and a Zumo 550 would be incredibly unfair.

What I do

I don’t think what I do is necessarily universally right, but it works for me. I almost exclusively use my phone as a satnav – I’ve a Cat S52 and a Ram X-Grip.

I use different apps for different sorts of rides:

• To take me to a postcode as quickly and boringly as possible, I use Here Maps
• For a planned day-trip I’ll use Kurviger – do the planning on the website and send the route to my phone
• If I’m out somewhere on my own and want a fun way back I’ll use Calimoto; I don’t tend to use it when leading people because of the propensity to go down dirt roads
• For a touring holiday or any other ride where I’m going to several places I’ll use CoPilot

If I’m going off road I’ll use Locus Maps for navigating, using the OSM maps. I also have ViewRanger for viewing the OS maps, but I find OS maps too busy and confusing to navigate with.