Quest Vs the rest

I have decided I need a sat nav on the bike, mainly to find addresses in cities when i have to work at different places. i have a tomtom for the car which does the job and i have though of sealing it in an otter box etc. However the price of a quest seems attractive with units online at less than £100. Are there any draw backs to the quest? can it search on post codes?

Original Quest can't do postcode searches, Quest 2 can but this has other problems and aren't that cheap anyway. Address searching is by country, town/city/village, street and finally house number. If a house or building name then entering '0' as the house number will get you to the street. This all works OK but is, admittedly, more fiddly than entering a post code.

Otherwise Quest is a great unit. Only sold mine a couple of weeks ago having had it's replacement, a 2720, for over a year and deciding that I'd kept it as a back-up long enough without using it.

The refurbished units for less than £100 will need you to add a bike mount and RAM mounting hardware. If you want a powered mount you're looking at another £60+ at least, unless you can find used (rare as rocking horse poo). RAM do a power unit (called the QPAC) to go with their bare cradle or you can get the complete Gamin powered cradle.

Bumpkin said:

Original Quest can't do postcode searches, Quest 2 can but this has other problems and aren't that cheap anyway. Address searching is by country, town/city/village, street and finally house number. If a house or building name then entering '0' as the house number will get you to the street. This all works OK but is, admittedly, more fiddly than entering a post code.

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I've got a Quest that I've replaced with a Zumo. While the above is true, I've never had an issue with it while a lot of people I know are always having trouble with Postcode searches. Postcodes give you an area where as addresses give you a road and house. the above might be slightly longer to set up, but in the case that you dont have a number at least you know you are on the right street.

The only pita with the Quest is its limited memory size - its ok if you only cover a limited area, but if you are traveling distances you'll need to keep swapping maps. Mine could hold maps as far north as Nottingham using City Map 08. Small price to pay if you want a good cheap unit.

The Quest has a small screen, and it is not easy to operate with gloves on.

Other than that I think the Quest is great.

The only pita with the Quest is its limited memory size - its ok if you only cover a limited area, but if you are traveling distances you'll need to keep swapping maps. Mine could hold maps as far north as Nottingham using City Map 08. Small price to pay if you want a good cheap unit.

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i got the impression from the ad that they had full UK mapping loaded and ready to go. is ther memory not big enough for the whole of mainland UK?

http://www.mynewcheap.co.uk/products/details/garmin-quest/1586/

LiquidLAN said:

The only pita with the Quest is its limited memory size - its ok if you only cover a limited area, but if you are traveling distances you'll need to keep swapping maps. Mine could hold maps as far north as Nottingham using City Map 08. Small price to pay if you want a good cheap unit.

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If you're talking about coverage for the UK then it sounds like you had an American model which only has 115MB of map storage memory. The European model has 243MB as the road density is far higher in Europe. This enables the Quest to hold all of the UK and a little of Northern French coast (for example). This is with City Nav v8 mapping. Mapping is loaded as tiles, ISTR that the UK is about 18 tiles. You can load other parts of Europe as you need them as long as all the loaded tiles will fit into the 243MB. You don't load a country at a time, unless you want to, just the areas you need.

Ian, hopefully that answers the question you raise immediately above, mynewchaep should be selling European Quests and if they say all of UK pre-loaded then they must be. You need to be careful about the US models if buying from eBay. However, if, as a seller, you let eBay automatically show a specification for a Quest it'll say it has 115MB of memory so there maybe some auctions that say 115MB but are in fact 243MB models.. all very confusing for the unwary buyer.

Thanks for the help. i'll get one ordered.