Garmin Street Pilot 111 delux?

[ianmac]

Does anybody out there have a Garmin GPS Street Pilot 111? If so does it come with ALL of Europe preloaded on unit? Also what mount works best on GS1200?(any pics?)Handle bar not cross bar,

Plus what is battery life if not run from bike power?

Any general coments welcome , this is my 1st , looked a Quest but don,t think it would handle England, North Spain , back thro France trip with small memory, am I wrong?

Streert Pilot on offer for £280.00, good price?
thanks all!

 

[GSmonkey]

Don't know anything about the Quest, but I do own a SPIII.

-You don't get anything pre-loaded on the unit as such. There is a 'basemap' but its no good to man nor beast. You have to load on the maps from the software (Mapsource) which comes with the package. On a 128Mb card (which is supplied with the unit) you will typically get 3/4 of the UK on, or all of the UK excluding London. Obviously with the 256 card you can get quite a bit more.

-Don't consider running it without a hardwire connection to the bike for two reasons:
1) It eats batteries for lunch, will only last a few short hours with the display on high contrast (required for riding during the day).

2) With batteries only, you will find that when you go over a bump, the batteries will move slightly causing a loss of battery power - hence switching the unit off. This makes it almost worthless. I put batteries in the unit purely for connecting to the PC for downloads.


Generally if you're looking to shell out cash consider that the SPIII is now discontinued. It has a slower processor so route calculations on the fly can be quite slow. Personally, if I was looking to spend cash on a GPS, it would be something faster than the SPIII. That said, the SPIII is not that slow that it makes me want to get rid of the unit. Obviously bargains are to be had on the SPIII because its discontinued - sub £300 on ebay I've seen for new units, I'm sure used probably around £200.

Good luck with whatever you choose.

 

[Deleted account W]

Any general coments welcome , this is my 1st , looked a Quest but don,t think it would handle England, North Spain , back thro France trip with small memory, am I wrong?

Slightly wrong

The Quest holds 256mb of maps, I've just plotted a route from Nottingham to Gibralter and loaded all the maps required and that only takes up 82mb of memory.

See below.........

 

[Taff]

Does anybody out there have a Garmin GPS Street Pilot 111? ..... it would handle England, North Spain , back thro France

As GSmonkey said, you need to download map segments onto the card - forget the basemap. You will certainly not be able to put ALL of England, Northern Spain and France onto a card, but like in Whattons example, you can use the "Select Maps Around Route" option. Personally I like to play safe with map segments - how often have you gone off a pre-determined route, or just decided on the spur of the moment to take a different route. Having said that, if memory is an issue it just seems daft to download the whole of France, if you're only going to say Normandy. There is a happy medium somewhere.

To give you an example below, I just managed to get squeeze a recent trip to Berlin onto a 256Mb card, the area coloured pink shows the downloaded maps - so you can see that there's just no chance of you getting all of France etc onto a single card. You could of course buy another 256Mb card, but they cost around £120 each. Do the sums and bear in mind the cost of a say a 2610 and a Quest (both of which seem to be the current GPS units of choice). The 2610 uses Compact Flash (CF) cards so if you need the whole of France etc, you can just get a bigger CF card - and they are a lot cheapper than the Garmin cards (which the SP3 uses) which are max 256Mb in capacity anyway.

My SP3 worked well on my recent trip - if I had any complaints, it was just that if I did take a wrong turn, it seemed to take a while for it to recalculate. In reality it was probably no more than a minute, but it just seems a lot longer when you're waiting on the side of a strange road and you're in a rush. Would I do another trip to Germany with a SP3? Without doubt Yes ... but I would prefer to do it with a 2610.

 

[ianmac]

Thanks all!Whatton with "Select Maps Around Route"how far either side of route does it take you in miles?is it automatic or can you chose distance around? I take it you get POI,s /Petrol stations in that info?
Taff did that Berlin trip use up all the 256 mgb?

 

[GSmonkey]

I'm in the middle of planning a route from Calais to Interlaken + all of Switzerland and it easily fits on a 128Mb card. You're never going to be able to load on all of europe, as its over 1.5Mb.

It doesn't give a distance around the route as such. Each map is of a different size...all looks fairly random. Whichever map your route intersects, you then add this to the GPS.

Each map contains all the small roads, and points of interest e.g. petrol stations etc. The unit is fairly unusable in an area where you don't have the proper maps loaded, as the base map is not particularly accurate, so the GPS keeps telling you you're off route.

 

[Taff]

Taff did that Berlin trip use up all the 256 mgb?

Almost. I think that by using the "Selct Maps Around Route" option it came to about 235Mb. But when i loaded up maps which did not hold any of the route - but very close, I added them as well. The whole pink shaded area in the above picture I think came to 252Mb.

You can't select maps depending on miles from the route. It seems that if your route goes onto a map segment (regardless of how small the section of the rooute is) the whole map gets included. Sorry, I know you directed that question at Whatton, but I'm sure that I read a thread of his saying he was off to play on some mountains for a week or so.

 

[Kropotkin]

Interesting thread. I have a related question, if people don't mind me butting in.

Can you freely select areas of maps to add to a unit? I am looking at buying a Quest some time soon, but the way we travel on holiday is all pretty random. We have a general destination, but I don't normally start thinking about a particular route until the evening before. So each night, at dinner I would get the maps out and look at the surrounding area, then enter a route into the PDA (which I am currently using) when I got back to the hotel (or at the campsite). That's OK on the PDA, because I have the whole of a particular country loaded. So, could I load, for example, the north and east of Spain on a Quest, without planning routes through there, or not? Can I just select a chunk of map, check that it'll fit on the unit, and copy it to the unit?

Thanks for any info,

David

 

[Taff]

Can you freely select areas of maps to add to a unit? ... So, could I load, for example, the north and east of Spain on a Quest, without planning routes through there, or not? Can I just select a chunk of map, check that it'll fit on the unit, and copy it to the unit?

Yes. You can transfer waypoints, routes and /or maps from your computer to the GPS unit. If you don't want to transfer routes, then just transfer the maps - and create your own routes when you're out there. To save hassle though, if I were you I would try and sort out as many of your waypoints on the computer (before transferring them to the unit) as I just find it so much easier. You can of course create waypoints on the unit, but it's far more "fiddly".

Just a word of warning though, I understand that Mapsource detail is not brilliant in Spain or Ireland, but you'd better check that with someone who knows, as I've never used mine in Spain.

 

[Kropotkin]

Taff, thanks for the info, good stuff. None of the maps of Spain in any of the nav systems are particularly detailed, as Navteq (who provide the maps) are still busy mapping Spain.

But in TomTom (which I use) most of the roads are present, but smaller towns tend not to have streets marked (unless they go to another town), and huge chunks of the map have no POI at all.