Garmin GPS Cycling Maps
I bought a Garmin eTrex Vista Cx (snappy huh?) as a device to track and plan road rides on my bike. What I didn’t realise was that the £200 only buys you the device, not the maps. Well, you get a map with about four roads in London. Useful.
To be fair, the built in altimeter, speedo, tacho etc functions are fine for stats geeking (when combined with the slow, painful, but useful MotionBased), but I really wanted to be able to explore, confident that I’d always have a map home. I’ve been unable to find simple advice on maps on the internets so I hope my costly mistakes will be of use to someone…
Don’t Do This…Don’t do what I did I buy the Memory Map of Great Britain. Even though its amazingly detailed, you can’t transfer the maps off the CD. So all you can do is plan routes and look at pretty maps. It’s an expensive, off-line, Google maps. To add insult to injury it’s locked to your PC, you can’t even sell it on to another schmuck.
In fact, don’t buy any of the official CDs from Garmin. They are horrible to use, very expensive, require a PC to work (which invariably crashes when using Parallels on a Mac) and the DRM is horrid.
Don’t bother with opensource/free/cheap mapping. I tried Smelly Biker’s maps. They aren’t nearly detailed enough for road cycling in the...
