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Oh no, another question about GPS units

ultracyclist

New member
I have put off my purchase of a GPS until now.

I would like to use it for both car and motorcycle. The Garmin 6XX is a bit rich for my blood.

What are some good alternatives? Nuvi? Tom Tom? In the cage, the unit would be powered with the adapter. On the bike mostly by battery with a tank bag mount or from the bike battery (1973 R75/5). Use would be mostly city/urban. Blue tooth would be nice, but I could live with old fashioned wires to ear pieces or whatever, too.

I just do not want to spend big bucks on this. I have been looking at Amazon, Best buy, GPS City

My previous GPS was a 2007 Magellan Maestro and that device was disappointing both in durability and features.

thanks in advance for your help.
 
A year and half ago I was in the same position, wanting to replace the original NAV I on my K1200LT. I ended up getting the Garmin Zumo 220. Why? Well Garmin does market it specifically as a motorcycle unit. It comes with a complete mounting kit for most motorcycles and for cage use too. It comes with Mapsource for planning routes. It comes with the wiring harness for a motorcycle. We also started using it in the car where I tried out the battery instead of plugging it in and was pleasantly surprised with run times. It has separate modes for motorcycle, car & walking, all with slightly different features available. It works well with gloves. If you have a BlueTooth headset or intercom it can send audio directions to your headset or intercom but nothing more. While it is still not a budget GPS it is considerably less costly than the 6XX series.

I also looked at the Garmin 500 and 550 from GPS City with adding their motorcycle kit. It was even less that the Zumo 220 but on of my wife's requirements for me was that she wanted me to be able to have the directions sent to the headset when in "alien territory".
 
Ditto on the Garmin 500. If you can live without the Bluetooth feature it will get the job done at a much lower price. I've out over 20k on mine and no problems to date.
 
I use a Zumo 550 and have used multiple other Garmin units. All of them have about the same positional accuracy regardless of price. The most important feature is can you update maps and put your own routes into them. After that just compare bells and whistles and select the one you can afford. Actually pretty simple. What complicates matters is recommendations like this one. We all have our favorites and biases. Buy a cheap one and you'll soon figure out whether you made a mistake or not.
 
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