Best GPS for cycle-camping - with turn-by-turn directions?

[Polar Bear]

The Garmin I bought off poler bear  routeing sends me down footpaths even when set for road's only  . So I leave it set on autoroute and ignore it's more adventurous ideas ☺

Ah yes, the idiosyncrasies of a Garmin GPS60 CSX!   Great for lat long though and finding yourself on a paper map.   

I fell out with it purely because I couldn't read it.   Not much point having handlebar candy if you can't actually use it!

[Ningishzidda]

Take paper maps.

Look ahead to check for ‘Highways’ ( any dual carriageways ). ‘Delivery van’ will use them, and you don’t know what they are like unless you use the time between now and your departure to study the roads with Streetview in the places that might cause grief.

‘Bicycle’ and ‘Avoid Highways’ will take you longer that the shortest route. In fact, any Garmin will probably take you longer than the shortest route.

[Andrew]

Or is that just me???

Nope, me too. I get lost even when I know where I'm going. In fact, I ONLY get lost when I know where I'm going. Come think of it, that's nearing a statement of the obvious. There's a life lesson in there somewhere.

[frankly frankie]

Don't take paper maps.  On a tour they are heavy and bulky and offer nothing that the GPS doesn't, except maybe some tactile pleasure in the evenings.  (And there are other ways of getting that.)

‘Bicycle’ and ‘Avoid Highways’ will take you longer that the shortest route. In fact, any Garmin will probably take you longer than the shortest route.

If you click-click across France on every road you want to use, it doesn't matter what routing algorithms you have set up, it can't go wrong.  You could even click on each alternate road (to halve your clicks / double your distance) and it still wouldn't go wrong.  You're not riding circular routes so that common pitfall doesn't appply.  In central France the road network is not that dense, so you can easily cover a day's riding with 10 clicks with absolutely no chance of going wrong.  Takes no more than 10 minutes of your time to set this up each evening.

[cycleman]

Due to Christmas I now find myself with two Garmin edge touring GPS,s ☺. I have used the find shop's and cafe's and short distance routeing so far. The circular routeing seems interesting also .

[Ariadne]

I thought I'd report back - we got a Touring Plus, and it seems pretty good so far. We've done a couple of rides in areas we know, to see what it suggests, and it's pretty smart. Nice and clear to read, etc. A test route in an area of France that we know worked well, too. So - we'll see. Thanks, everyone!

[Samuel D]

None of them will give reliable A-B routing over a distance of more than about 20-30km - so your daily plan-ahead should be composed of 3 or 4 hops.  Depending on the package you buy, you may have to factor in the cost of adding maps into the GPS.

Why is it that they can’t auto-route over a decent distance? This is frustrating for me. If I go for a ride, get lost or otherwise end up in an unexpected place, and just want to head for home 40 km away, they tend not to work. The eTrex 20 can grind away for literally 10 minutes (during which time I freeze) and after all of that still throw up an out-of-memory error. The Edge 800 is a bit better (faster) but still often takes several minutes to produce a route and often fails. It may not help that I’m usually not far from the vast road network of Paris.

My 2012 iPhone throws up any route instantly (and guesses the right road if I mistake a boulevard for a rue), but maybe that’s not a valid comparison. More gallingly, my 2008 nüvi spits out a route in seconds. The nüvi is a low-cost, in-car sat-nav made by … Garmin.

The eTrex and Edge also suffer from having character-limited input fields for things like road names. Sometimes I have to give up entering an address by name and just zoom and pan and zoom and pan and click on the stamp-sized map display to select a destination. Neither the eTrex’s joystick nor the Edge’s non-multi-touch, non-capacitive touchscreen works very well for this. Of course map redraws also take an eternity at some zoom levels…

By the way, I have found that paying for Garmin City Navigator maps makes auto-routing much better, i.e. just about usable (with the above restriction on route distance), whereas with various OpenStreetMap-based maps I could never get auto-routing to give sensible recommendations, no matter how I fiddled with the routing options.

[fhills]

This is handy for touring.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.putitout.Greggs&hl=en_GB

And see recent thread on spoons POIs

[frankly frankie]

Why is it that they can’t auto-route over a decent distance? This is frustrating for me. If I go for a ride, get lost or otherwise end up in an unexpected place, and just want to head for home 40 km away, they tend not to work. The eTrex 20 can grind away for literally 10 minutes (during which time I freeze) and after all of that still throw up an out-of-memory error. The Edge 800 is a bit better (faster) but still often takes several minutes to produce a route and often fails. It may not help that I’m usually not far from the vast road network of Paris.

Dependent mainly on the maps you have loaded in the device.  Different Garmins (even different GPSs with the same model number) will have different maps installed, and sometimes 2 or more maps in combination.  The information required to auto-route is entirely contained within the maps, and the quality of this information varies.
If you have your GPS routing setup as 'bicycle' - this may seem like an obvious choice but really it isn't the best, car works better if you are a road cyclist - and your map contains a lot of cycle-tagged ways such as towpaths, bridleways etc, that is going to slow things down a lot.
Also Garmins have much less processing power than your iPhone - and a longer battery runtime to compensate.  The Nuvi has the advantage that it is not battery-limited, so can have a beefier processor, plus the maps as installed are a best match for the unit.

[andrew_s]

The Garmin I bought off poler bear  routeing sends me down footpaths even when set for road's only  . So I leave it set on autoroute and ignore it's more adventurous ideas ☺

What a Garmin will do when asked to route from A to B will depend on what maps it has on it.

If you use Garmin's own maps, the menu options such as "avoid toll roads" or "avoid highways" (i.e. major ones) mean what they say, but if you are using a version of OSM such as OpenFietsMap, the road properties have been mucked about with to give "improved" cycle routing, and you'll find that "avoid highways" may actually mean "avoid cycle tracks". It's a case of carefully reading and taking notes on what it says on whatever website the OSM data was downloaded from.
If you are having problems calculating longer routes, trying a different map may also help.


I don't like planning where to go using a small window, so I take small scale paper maps (1:250,000 or 1:400,000) that I use for deciding where to go the next day, and use auto-routed fairly short hops (5-20km, depending on road density) put in the previous evening for on-the-road navigation. That's if I bother - I'll often just use the on-screen map as a memory jogger, or use frankie's "click on the next café" method.

[frankly frankie]

Bar, please - I'm allergic to coffee 

[andrew_s]

Actually, it's usually a random village that looks big enough to have a bar or café (with due regard to French opening hours and how long it will take to get there).

[Ningishzidda]

Take LEJOG for example. TomTom Rider will generate a route ( without motorways and major roads ) of 838 miles. It takes five minutes to finish.
Zoom in and scroll to see where the route passes through towns and villages at convenient distances. Use the Greggs App to organise luncheon.
If you happen to accidentally discard the route, click on ‘Recent destinations’ and find “John O’Groats”.
If you take a detour off the initial route by going somewhere like Dover, TT will keep regenerating the route from where you are to John O’Groats.

[alexb]

I've found that https://cycle.travel will do turn by turn navigation for you, from two points and export it as a gpx file - on a phone. Using my Android phone (1st Gen Motorola Moto G)
Getting that onto something like an Etrex could be as simple as using a micro-USB to USB converter/cable with a plug in micro SD card reader (not tried it, but seems reasonable) using something like Astro File manager to shuffle the file into the correct directory.

Alternatively, if you have a battery pack or charger for the phone, you could even run the phone using Navfree to do your routing for you. This uses the phones GPS with downloaded open streetmaps.

[StuAff]

I've found that https://cycle.travel will do turn by turn navigation for you, from two points and export it as a gpx file - on a phone. Using my Android phone (1st Gen Motorola Moto G)
Getting that onto something like an Etrex could be as simple as using a micro-USB to USB converter/cable with a plug in micro SD card reader (not tried it, but seems reasonable) using something like Astro File manager to shuffle the file into the correct directory.

Did something similar in Belgium last year- routing on Osmand (funnily enough on a Moto G 1st Gen), connected my Edge 705 to the phone with a USB OTG cable, file straight over to the GPX folder on the phone. I've uploaded files to Garmin Connect by sending the other way.