| I've got a Garmin Street Pilot III which is a self contained GPS system - it's the same unit that BMW and Ducati sell in rebadged form (although it's just been superceded). I got it several years ago when GPS on PDA's wasn't really a big thing. It is a portable unit that has different mounting attachments so that it will transfer between my car or my wife's car very easily. It would also fit on the ST, somewhere on the top yoke. I bought a spare power cable to wire it into the ST's loom (since you can always tuck the unit's power plug somewhere out of the way when it's not on the bike) but I've never got around to finding a suitable mounting kit for the bike.
Upsides are that it has worked perfectly for about 3 years, it has a few quirks (like not recognising that a roundabout is a roundabout unless it has a kerbed island - it treats mini roundabouts that are just painted on the road as if they're an ordinary junction). It got confused when I was in Ireland, but then again the Garmin website does point out that the Ireland map only has partial coverage. Other quirks are that it (if you use it locally) it will take you by a logical route and not necessarily the way you would normally take, you have to assume that it does this in every locality so it doesn't navigate like someone with local knowledge would, but it always gets you there even if a road is closed it quickly recalculates.
The navigation view is pretty good, colour screen and audio prompts as well, although if you wanted to use audio on a bike you would need to have all the gubbins, earpieces in the lid would be a minimum, it would work OK although it would work best if you ran it through an Autocom or summat like that (getting a pricey deal then though)
Downsides, battery life is limited so rechargables or plugging it in to the vehicle are are must. The updates that you can download from the Garmin site are always a bit of a faff (I do them so infrequently that I forget how to do it between downloads) and there are two sorts of download - one for the maps, one for the firmware in unit. Other downsides are that they use a system of licenses and unlock codes for the map regions, you get an unlock license when you buy it, but buying more regions is very expensive. The memory chips are also very expensive, they're only the same technology as a digital camera chip but because they come in a proprietary shape and size they cost a comparative fortune (I think I paid about £120 for a 256Mb? - could be wrong it was a while ago). Obviously the bigger memory chip you fit, the more map regions you can load.
Having said all that, I think that the latest versions come with the biggest memory chip as standard and free unlock codes for the whole of Europe.
[Edited on 2-1-2005 by Jools]  |