Thanks to Grinnz via haxmeister:
Do cpan PLS
and then install this plugin:

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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 keep talking to people about podcasts, so here’s my list of the ones I’ve probably recommended at you:
I’ve never really listened to My Dad Wrote A Porno but it is very popular. It’s three people reading a dirty romance novel someone (the father of one of the presenters) wrote really badly and commenting on how badly written it is.
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.
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.
Contrary to my initial assumptions, there’s some things it does well
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:
(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.
(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:
And worse because it:
I expect some of this this will get better and the rest just more-acceptable with time, but I’ve really not had the “why didn’t I do this sooner” thing that I keep hearing about other people doing.
The “Favourites” feature is very crude and unconfigurable but the Garmin Connect app installs itself as a mapping thing, so when you “open” a location on the phone (from a calendar event, say) you can send it to the satnav. I suspect that I’ll carry on using my phone for storing locations and whatnot, and just send them to the satnav as I’m used to sending it to a satnav app.
I think it’s worth having, but I can’t see myself becoming one of those people who advises other people buy one. This is definitely lacking in almost every way compared to CoPilot and friends, and I’m not (yet) convinced that that’s just familiarity.
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!
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.
Front Axle Allen Key | 14mm |
---|---|
Rear Axle Nut | 22mm |
Chain Slack | 40-50mm |
Spark Plug | NGK CR7E |
Front Brake Pads | EBC FA209/2 |
Rear Brake Pads | EBC FA213 |
Oil | 2.9L (fill 2L, pause to let it flow down, fill last 0.9L) |
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:
In the little pouch, that’s:
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
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.
All my IP addresses have rather hurriedly changed. If you’re using the names below, you’ll be fine and when the DNS changes propagate (~3h) everything will work again.
If you’re not, you’ll need to update things. Ideally to using the names :) fairygodmother.avi.co is now the same IP address as bigbadwolf.avi.co, not just the same host.
Old | New | Name |
---|---|---|
80.87.131.17 | 80.87.129.54 | swamp.avi.co |
80.87.131.16 | 80.87.128.7 | bigbadwolf.avi.co |
80.87.131.48 | 80.87.130.153 | donkey.avi.co |
80.87.135.231 | 80.87.130.154 | merlin.avi.co |
80.87.131.18 | 80.87.128.7 | fairygodmother.avi.co |
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:
And, thanks to Matt McLelland, there’s a manual for the 2016-on ones here:
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:
Front axle allen key | 17mm |
Rear axle nut | 27mm (12mm & 13mm for the chain adjusters) |
Chain slack | Roadie: 15 - 25mm XC: 20 - 30mm |
Spark plug | NGK CR9EK - 16mm socket |
Front brake pads | EBC: FA226 Ferodo: FDB570 OE: T2020377 |
Rear brake pads | EBC: FA140 Ferodo: FDB531 OE: T2020602 |
Oil | 3.6L 10w40 |
Coolant | ~2.5L OAT |
Front tyre | Roadie: 110/80 19 or 110/90 19 XC: 90/90 21 |
Rear tyre | 150/70 17 |
It’s not without its flaws, though. Here’s a list of issues I’ve had/noticed, hopefully in descending order of bad-ness:
I’d booked a few days off work for a trip to Germany that Mian was planning, but then he crashed and couldn’t afford to go. I’ve made a few attempts at getting to Scotland in the past, each scuppered by other plans being made, and I’ve been hankering to have a go at a trip on my own, so it seemed sensible to take the five days to get to John O’Groats and back.
A quick fiddle with Furkot suggested that I had something like 1700 miles to cover in five days, which I rounded to 300 miles per day almost immediately before deciding that 300 miles was a reasonable day’s riding. My rear tyre was awfully squared off so the obvious solution seemed to be blat it up the M1 and M6 past all the lovely places I’ve already seen, then get a new tyre fitted at or near the border. And I might as well do that after work on the Thursday (I’d booked the Friday, Monday and Tuesday off).
So I booked the bike in for a new tyre at a Triumph shop in Carlisle on Friday morning and set about finding somewhere cheap and not-too-bad to stay. I ended up booking at the Travelodge at Kendal which wasn’t really success.
Thursday – London to Kendal
Well, this was the easy bit. I’ve long had a strong aversion to motorways on the grounds that I’m riding a motorbike and not driving a lorry, but a couple of trips (most notably leaving work one evening for Harwich and being in Cologne by about 11 the next day) have convinced me to give them a go.
So I worked from home, left at half four, jumped on the M1 and then the M6 and, aside from a brief error onto the M42 and A5, just made progress and dispatched with 250 miles in quite pleasant weather ahead of most of the traffic without once getting distracted by all the fantastic places I was zipping past.
Friday – Kendal to Fort William
Breakfast was at Tebay services (the farm shop one) where I also bought the bits required to fashion a battery charger for my camera since I’d neither charged the camera nor brought a working charger for it. I paused again at Carlisle to get a new tyre and fawn over the new Tigers, before cracking on up through Gretna Green to Glasgow
I’d noticed by now that I’d forgotten to pack a number of things – I had no fuel bottle for my stove, no chain lube at all and while I’d brought a pot to cook in I had no cup to drink out of and no fork or spoon to eat with, so I paused in Glasgow a little longer than I’d intended to.
Heading out of Glasgow past Dumbarton, up alongside Loch Lomond and over Glen Coe was a fantastic suggestion of what was to come from Scotland:
That last photo’s from when I stopped because the temperature gague had been flashing at me in that way that suggested that something’s gone awfully wrong. It’s a weird place for an engine to overheat – a fast, empty road in a country not really known for its high temperatures. I briefly realised I’d never actually fixed the fan after it broke in Germany last year, and then actually had a look:
That’s not really supposed to do that. A handy local stopped as I was wondering what on earth to bodge that together with – I think he was on an air-cooled BMW but I’ll forgive him.
He said that the petrol station on the way into Glen Coe was about 5 miles away and stocked “basically everything”. I somewhat pointlessly filled the coolant system up out of my camelbak (another good reason to only ever have water in there) and cracked on past some more lovely scenery to fix it.
During the application of Magic Network Rail Tape (I think that’s its technical name) and some jubilee clips I heard the familiar sound of an approaching BMW flat twin. Fortunately, this was a water-cooled one so the rider couldn’t gloat, but he did advise me that the ferry I was hoping to catch first thing in the morning from Mallaig (about an hour and a half away still) to Skye was likely full and that I might end up waiting for hours if I turned up without a crossing booked.
He left on his way once I’d persuaded him that I thought the thing was fixed – I decided I’d see how far I could get towards Mallaig and book the ferry when I was reasonably convinced I’d be able to get onto it. After several scares that were just reminders of how carefully this engine needs its coolant bleeding, as I reached Fort William I decided I’d definitely be able to make the ferry in the morning and I ought to book a ticket.
The earliest available crossing was at 16:20, so I found a campsite nearby instead.
Saturday – Fort William to Thurso
I woke up in the morning and reasoned that the current bodge had been ‘fine’ for the couple of hours it took to get to the campsite and it didn’t really look like it had leaked overnight so it was probably fixed, and headed across to Applecross.
Regardless of how much better it might have been to go across Skye (and, really, the only draw for me had been the ferry) I didn’t feel I’d missed much by just cracking on down the main road.
The Applecross road is one that I’ve heard much mention of but never really looked into – I didn’t really know what to expect. The road to the beginning (in Tornapress) is delightful. There’s a singletrack railway alongside it with a lovely lake the other side, and the odd tunnel.
But delightful as that is, the Applecross pass is just a wonderful mountain pass. Almost entirely singletrack with the odd passing place and not a lot of crash barrier, generally poorly surfaced and set in some wonderfully distracting scenery:
Applecross itself is a nice seaside village, providing both a good car park in which to deal with the failure of last night’s bodge and a nice community-owned petrol pump:
Since I’d just rebodged the hose again (and the hole was bigger this time) I thought it would be best to head straight for a town to get some better supplies for this. It also seemed sensible to head fairly directly for the campsite (at Thurso) with a view to getting there early enough to effect a proper repair and then leave it overnight for any glue to set.
This was annoying – in Applecross I was about halfway up the West coast of Scotland, and Thurso is essentially the East end of the North coast. The bit of Scotland that I really wanted to see was the North-East corner, and here I was planning to skirt right round it.
I sighed and thought I’d just take the most major road I could find to the next town that was remotely on the way
Ah well, I’ll go back over the Applecross pass if I must :)
I pulled into a Tesco in Dingwall in order to top up on Cup-a-Soup sachets, but as I parked up I heard the familiar sound of spraying water and looked down to see my front tyre getting another soaking out of the now slightly-displaced Applecross bodge. I headed into town and found a hardware shop.
The original bodge had been Network Rail Magic Tape and jubilee clips, to which I later added duct tape. The second had been thicker self-amalgamating tape and duct tape (and jubilee clips) but this time I sought advice from ‘Papa Greenbury’ who suggested a glue to really fill the gaps. I Uhu-glued some duct tape in place, then added some circlips and thought I’d better leave that to set so went off in search of a Wispa.
By now, this had gone from being a fairly entertaining problem that’s just adding some jeopardy and interest to an otherwise run-of-the-mill trip to something a bit annoying. I was stopping frequently to top up the water and couldn’t really claim to believe my own lie that all I was doing was replacing air that had bled out. Also, all that glorious countryside was just over to my left as I ‘progressed’ up a main road.
There’s basically no photos from the next five hours – I just smashed it up the A9 trying to get to Thurso before it all blew up.
As I pulled into Brora (about 50 miles short of Thurso) the overheating light came on again and I coasted into a petrol station. Here I noticed that the radiator was cold, so the system was empty again; I set about filling it up and told myself that if I properly bled it as well, then I’d probably get most of the way to Thurso on that.
While I was doing that, a man on a Fireblade pulled up into the petrol station and asked if I needed a hand. This had happened a lot by now, and it’s really nice to have all these offers of help. But it’s also a bit annoying how few people (myself included) happen to carry around with them all the tools to repair a steel coolant pipe.
I tried to dismiss this offer, too – “yeah, there’s a hole in a steel coolant pipe, I’m just topping it up and I’ll be fine” but he wasn’t so easily dissuaded – “you wont get anywhere on that. My house is 11 miles up the road, and I’m sure my son will be able to sort that out”.
It seemed a daft offer to refuse, so I headed up there. A few hours later I’d been introduced to three or four generations of the family, all of whom had multiple bikes in various places and, perhaps more importantly, had had a nice plate welded up over the hole in the seriously-quite-degraded pipe. It was absolutely amazing – I cut short an MX session when they were called back from the track, then six people basically spent their evening fixing this complete stranger’s bike.
I left at about eight, just after dusk and thought I’d crack on up to Thurso – I still had 60-odd miles to cover. At the first bit of unlit road I flipped to full-beam and everything went dark… So I’ve got an electrical issue whereby when I use the full-beam circuit something shorts to ground and blows the fuse, taking out the dipped beam, too. Also, presumably in an effort to protect me from myself, the bike won’t start with non-working headlights (this seems more sensible now I’ve written it down).
I got to Thurso very late and tired and also *incredibly* low on fuel – I’d forgotten to actually fill up when the nice man took me off for some welding. Luckily the petrol station on the way into Thurso was still open (just!) since according to the range countdown on the bike I only had fuel for about an extra mile beyond the campsite.
Sunday – Thurso to Dundee, via Aberdeen
I slept incredibly well that night. Perhaps partly because of how tiring Saturday had been, and largely because I forgot to set an alarm and woke with a bit of a start a little after 9. I headed into town for a quick look around, and then on to Dunnet Head (the british mainland’s most northerly point) for breakfast.
That box ticked I headed for John O’Groats. I’ve been to Land’s End a few times and it’s brilliantly tragic and anticlimactic. I expected the same from John O’Groats.
What I got was the finish line to the “Ride Across Britain” and a bunch of closed shops.
which, in a way, was even better than I was expecting.
I’d arranged to meet Alan in Aberdeen on the way down. I can’t remember quite how long ago he moved there but I’ve been saying I’ll come and visit ever since, and he’s moving to Australia at the end of the month so it was about time I actually did that. On the way to Aberdeen I called in and delivered a crate of energy drink and a pile of cake to the family of welders – they’d said that was most appropriate!
And then on down towards Inverness. This is a lovely part of the world for a Triumph owner; all the oil refining means that the smell of hot engine oil that so often means another problem is actually just part of the scenery.
On the way I passed a sign for “Nigg”, which I followed rather optimistically hoping for a sign to something that’s both appropriate and funny. Obviously that didn’t happen, but I did find a cheeky ferry:
At this point I was still regarding the welded-up pipe as just the latest incarnation of the bodge, and I was a bit confident that if it all goes wrong Alan’s probably got something I can use to fix it. Since there’s a large bit of seawater in the way of my doing anything else I headed down and across to Inverness and then out along the fast-but-dull main road to Aberdeen.
I was still running a couple of hours behind because of the relaxing sleep in, and my plan required I get at least as far south as Dundee for the night. I got to Alan’s still with a not-leaking bike, and found that Aberdeen is almost exactly as unremarkably not-bad on first impression as everyone says. I left rather late after dark and headed straight down to a campsite just past Dundee.
Monday – Dundee to Whitby
With the whole of Sunday having gone without a coolant leak this was the first day that could just go as planned, but I’d also not actually planned this far ahead. Whitby seemed a good aim for the night (being about half way home) and Edinburgh, Kielder and the North York Moors are all on the way there.
So, I headed down through Edinburgh past the Forth Bridge and to the difficult-to-photograph-from-a-bike castle.
I Edinburgh I met a courier at a petrol station who recommended the A68 South-East as something “fun, with corners and no cameras” which was broadly accurate. I followed that down to Jedburgh where I turned West so I’d cross the border straight into Kielder National Park.
On the way I passed what turned out to be a Waterloo Momument.
Apparently you can’t drive there, and instead have to park up and walk which I didn’t bother with. I did, however, find a train station up an unpaved road:
Now that the bike wasn’t leaking it all got a bit consistent – I just carried on riding over the border, through Kielder, past a funny-named town and over the Tyne at Newcastle.
I hadn’t realised how suburban the Angel of the North was – I expected it to be on the way to Newcastle from the south, but it’s a bit of a way into it. And while there’s a handy layby for taking photos of it from the northern carriageway, anyone heading south must take photos as they go.
It had to happen eventually on a Scotland trip, and as I rolled in to Whitby it started raining.
Annoyingly this is the first time I managed to get to a campsite early enough that I could spend the evening sitting around and relaxing rather than just sticking up a tent and going to bed, so I sat in my tent and hid from the rain for a bit.
Tuesday – Whitby to London
The morning wasn’t a lot better. As I left Whitby the rain paused and it just felt like it was going to rain soon. But I spent long enough deviating round York and going over the Humber bridge for the rain to catch up.
On the way out of Hull, I saw a three-digit motorway which I thought I may as well go on for the novelty, where the much-predicted finally happened and I dropped the camera…
It was fine and working, but missing a bit of the case so no-longer waterproof. Given the weather, I didn’t really take any more photos on the otherwise quite plain-sailing rest of the ride home.
So, all up that’s about 1500 miles in five days which is quite doable but perhaps not something I’d inflict on anybody else; lunches were in petrol stations and with the mechanical problems there was no time to do anything besides riding the thing.
I definitely missed out a bunch of things that would’ve been really good – distilleries, the whole north-west corner, any form of interaction with the locals besides buying their petrol, the islands – and it was at least a little more stressful than I’d have liked. I’ve definitely got to get back, but with ten days or so…
Even more pictures are here and the Viewranger tracks are a bit split-up:
Work to Kendal
Kendal to Fort William
Fort William to Thurso
Thurso to Aberdeen and Aberdeen to Dundee
Dundee to Whitby
Whitby to Home
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.
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:
Cons:
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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These all might have changed somewhat since I wrote this:
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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:
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.