Edge 800 - what maps bundle for London?

[johking]

Hoping that some kind people on this knowledgable forum can help me out with the following:

My brother lives in London and wants to get back on his road bike. What concerns him about trying new routes is the fear of getting lost, so I want to buy him an Edge 800 for his birthday.

Basemap is apparently very lacking in detail so I want to know what maps to get him. I've done a lot of reading but am still a bit bamboozled. My understanding is:

OS are the usual great maps, but on the small screen can be cluttered and not easy to spot the route. Also they become blurry at max zoom.

City Navigator maps have more detail than basemap and are good in the city

OSM is a bit of a faff (he is very computer literate though). Reviews that I have read seem to be divided on their merit.

Other considerations are:

(1) Does City Navigator only cover cities and would he need OS if he gets the bug and starts taking the bike into the countryside? (He's never going to be off-road).

(2) He would defo want to design his own routes / download other people's from ridewithgps or similar. Does that make a difference to the choice?

At the moment I am thinking to either buy the version bundled with OS maps, or the basic version and buy City Navigator, or the basic version and leave him to wrestle with OSM. (I am discarding the top of the range version as the trainer bit doesn't interest him).

Given all the above, what would you go for?

Many thanks for any insight you can give

Jo

[Feanor]

You've pretty much got it covered.

The Basemap is not usefull, and is not routable.
The OS mapping is not the best on the small screen.

That leaves you with the City Navigator / OSM choice.
That's a bit like a Windows / Linux choice.

The 'City Navigator' name is a bit of a misnomer.
It is all of the UK ( or Europe, depending on the product you buy ).
Countryside is fully mapped as much as the cities.

For planning routes, I'm sure both will work equally well.
I'd note that CN is rather car-oriented, and does not map cycle routes and footpaths very well.
So if you set up a route and intend to take a cycle-path, it won't recognise that this exists and will route you on-road.
Example: the Barmouth Bridge on the BCM600.
I find this irritating but live-able-with.

I've not used OSM, so I can't comment on those, other than to note that sometimes the 'connections' between roads is not always correct, and so there can be routing annomalies caused by this.

[Veloman]

Have a look at previous pages of this thread and you find information.

I've found City Navigator to be very good in cities (surprise surprise!) and for general use, both walking, cycling and in the car.  I also have full coverage of OS maps which is great for walking in the country, but not much use IMO for cycling as there is too much information.  You can download routes and use with either.

Consider pricing, some of the bundled packages are very good value.  I got an Edge 800, HRM/cadence and full OS maps for a very good price and purchased City Navigator (Europe) separately as it was by far the cheapest way to do it.

Others will be along to give their views and you might find the 800 is not recommended!

[Veloman]

Worth a read:

http://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=47541.0

Might cover more than you want, but loads of info on maps etc for Edge 800.

[fuaran]

OSM is not really much hassle. You just have to download a suitable img file, then copy it onto a memory card. This website is probably the easiest option: http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/

And it is probably pretty much complete for roads in the UK. It also has a lot of cyclepaths, footpaths, bike shops, pubs etc, though this can vary by area.
Yes, you do get occasional routing problems etc, so maybe don't rely on it too much for routing as you go. But this isn't an issue if you are following a preplanned course.

[Sergeant Pluck]

Welcome

For the use you describe - London based brother, unfamiliar with the roads, wanting to get back out on the bike, doesn't like getting lost - my thoughts, having had OS and City Nav:

 - forget about OS. Don't be fooled by the fact that it looks like the "real" maps we grew up with. Complete waste of time for on-the-road use at cycling speeds. Completely useless on the bike. Good for planning a ride from the comfort of one's home. OK for mountain biking / off road touring, excellent for looking at off-road paths or short-cuts when planning a ride, but the on-device behaviour (detail level) makes it hard work.
 
- City Nav. The best option for on-device use. Bit of a learning curve, and it may appear to be lacking in fine detail at first glance, but for practical purposes it is the best. Routing has its problems but most of these are predictable or at least avoidable.

- OSM. No experience of this but my overall impression is that while it compares well with CN in some respects, it is still let down by its routing behaviour.

[johking]

Thank you all very much for speedy and comprehensive replies. That other thread was really useful too, Veloman.

I am much clearer now and will avoid OS, get City Navigator and leave it up to him if he wants to go with the OSM. Will search about for good bundles/separate purchase as suggested.

Brilliant!

[Sergeant Pluck]

Thank you all very much for speedy and comprehensive replies. That other thread was really useful too, Veloman.

I am much clearer now and will avoid OS, get City Navigator and leave it up to him if he wants to go with the OSM. Will search about for good bundles/separate purchase as suggested.

Brilliant!

I expect a strong defence of OSM will ensue and it might be worth hanging on for it. As I say, I have not made use of OSM, although I've been tempted to give it a go and I've explored it a bit. I might be wrong about the routing shortcomings as things may have moved on.

Last time I looked Handtec were cheapest for the device itself. Bear in mind that the 810 is about to come out; that might encourage further price drops for the 800.

[Manotea]

Whilst city nav can sometimes take longcuts out in the country, I've found it absolutely reliable using it for finding my way around London. YMMV.

[Ningishzidda]

OpenCycleMap?
A ten quid download is not a fantastic price to pay. When new roads appear, ( prob not in central London ) check them on the OCM website and if OCM have them, spend ten quid again.

[frankly frankie]

City Nav is the best choice. 
OSM is very good because it has bridleways etc that City doesn't - but in large university towns it's starting to suffer from 'too much information' - for some reason the display doesn't de-clutter as gracefully as Garmin's own maps do.

The problem with OS maps is well illustrated on this page.

NB if City is installed it's probably possible to add OSM as well, if he wants to - with the option to switch between maps on the device.

[johking]

Yes, I'd seen that page with the blurry OS shots, not good. It's great to have City Nav confirmed as his best option, for London anyway. Thanks all.

[deadhead1971]

I've used all options, and City Navigator would be my recommendation, for its clarity and simplicity.
I put up some screenshots to compare City Nav with OS Discoverer -
http://www.scarletfire.co.uk/2012/03/maps-comparison-city-navigator-and-os-discoverer/
You'll notice that when you zoom in beyond a certain point, the Discoverer map becomes rather useless.

[contango]

I use OSM maps but very rarely ask my GPS to route me in the field any more, simply because the routing algorithms are somewhat - er - unusual.

It knows cyclepaths, bridlepaths, and all sorts of other cut-throughs and the like that are available to cyclists but sometimes they are misclassified on the map. I've had my GPS tell me to turn onto a "bridlepath" that had six-foot metal barriers in front of it so close together I'd struggle to get through them, and on the other side (past the No Cycling sign) was a track about six inches wide covered in mud and with chest-high stinging nettles on both sides.

I used to use Garmin's UK Topo map but that would only route on roads and had no facility to route along bridlepaths etc, which meant it often took me the long way around because it didn't know about handy shortcuts. Working around that meant knowing the best place to navigate to based on where I was. It also periodically did really stupid things, like when it told me to turn right across the traffic, follow a parallel road for half a mile, then turn right across the traffic again onto the same road - I can only assume it was trying to choose a route that avoided the main road, but since the main road had a cycle lane it was safer and quicker to just stay put than cross traffic twice.

It would be great if there were some facility that differentiated between different styles of cycling - a sleek road bike would be fine on a cycle lane contraflow but probably not on a bridlepath while an MTB might just chew up the bridlepath and prefer it to the road. Of course the way some bridlepaths are compressed gravel and some are covered in six inches of mud doesn't help...

[frankly frankie]

I use OSM maps but very rarely ask my GPS to route me in the field any more, simply because the routing algorithms are somewhat - er - unusual.

It's because the map is a wiki and the contributions aren't harmonised in any way. 
If I walk or ride a section of unmapped bridleway, I then use that GPX file to update the OSM map.  I may mark the new section 'bridleway' - especially if I've seen bridleway signs on the ground.  It will connect to other already-mapped tracks that a) look exactly the same in real life, and b) may have been tagged differently by whoever put them there.  They may just be 'stoney track' or 'unsurfaced road' or some such.

On roads the same thing occurs because one person's idea of a 'secondary' road may connect to a continuation provided by someone else, that is marked 'tertiary' or maybe 'primary'.  These anomalies occur all over the world map.
(There is also a different problem in that some road junctions are incorrectly formed - a few roads that should connect don't, or occasionally vice versa.  This is because different contributors have widely different standards of precision.)

Many of these problems are very evident when a contributor is working on the map in edit mode - but there is of course an understandable strong reluctance to modify another contributor's work, to bring things into line.  Sometimes I do, but most times I don't.

The routing algorithm in the GPS assigns different weights to each of the various possible tags, and of course relies heavily on junctions being formed correctly.  Inconsistencies in both these areas lead to routing problems.