billyymc

So after doing the Cross Florida Ride a few weeks ago I have the urge (unfortunately!) to complete a double century ride this summer. Maybe two - one solo, and one with a few other riders is what's in the works so far.

I don't ride with a GPS right now. I don't care for any power or heart rate info. What I would like is the ability to upload routes from ridewithGPS (or similar), turn by turn navigation, the ability to reroute...and a 12ish hour battery life.

Does it exist? Or is battery life going to be my limiting factor?

Do'nt care that much about screen size...smaller is better to a point.

pdlamb

My old Garmin 800 can do most of what you're asking for, except the 12 hour battery life is right on the edge. One of the external batteries that are nearly ubiquitous can boost the battery when it starts to run low. The 820/1000/1030 are going to be pretty similar. Don't want power or heart rate? Don't hook up a power or HR sending unit!


Just to be sure, you do understand the follow a route with turn by turn navigation, and the ability to reroute, are antithetical? You'll likely want to start with re-routing turned off, to make sure you stay on route, and it'd be a good idea to jot down on a 3x5" card how to turn auto-routing back on and carry the card with you. Yeah, old school, but dang, it works.

redlude97

Garmin 500 if breadcrumbs is sufficient

Koyote

Or you could use a smartphone with an app like ridewithgps. Mount it to your handlebar, and bring along an external battery charger which is about the size of a lipstick.

zacster

A smartphone won't last for a double century I don't think. GPS tracking takes a lot of power.

europa

Wahoo Bolt will do it and I quite like its navigation. O
ther units will do what you want as well, you've quite a it of choice.

One nice thing about the Bolt, and possibly others (I haven't checked) is that if you get an SMS, it'll sound a chime and flash it on the screen. It also alerts you to phone calls though I haven't received one on the bike so don't know how this works. As a single parent, I find it rather comforting to know I'm not going to miss something because of traffic noise.

Koyote

Iride01 

If you have no other need or desire for one other than course navigation, I wouldn't recommend buying any. If you are not used gps's other than a nuvi perhaps, you might find them much more frustration and trouble than they are worth. Some never have an issue and some do.

I use a Garmin 500 every ride though. But I don't use the course features. I want the HR and other activity that can be logged so I can look at my performance at later dates and compare how I'm doing from one time to the other.

CliffordK

I have a cell phone dedicated to the bike (offline). Samsung S4 Mini. Double Capacity battery.

GPS works fine with the phone in Airplane mode. In fact, I can turn WIFI on and off with it in airplane mode (off when riding)

For a long ride, I usually set the screen timeout to about 15 or 30 seconds and blink the screen on when I need it.

With pretty extreme battery conservation, I can ride all day running both Strava and RWGPS on the phone. A spare battery or external battery is nice, but probably not needed.

I don't have audio prompts.

One issue is that if I hit the wrong button, Strava can forget its route (tracking is OK). I can tether my two phones for about 1 minute at a time, which is generally enough to refresh data if ever needed, but I tend to memorize the routes, so navigation is only needed for part of the ride.

At least Strava isn't very good with downloading offline maps. It can be improved by zooming in and then scrolling through the entire route before one looses WIFI.

I can't finish a double century in 12 hours

cccorlew

I've used a Garmin 305, 500 and 520. I always added a battery extender to make the 200 miles.

sierrabob

You need to make a special cable for the Edge 500 to work with external power: cut up two USB cables and splice just black and red together, then connect to a mini-USB otg cable. With that you can ride forever and have TbT navigation, hr, cadence, speed, etc.

sierrabob

For navigation assistance from an android phone, I'd use the Osmand app. It will reroute should you get off track or desire a new course. Using its own database, you can place your phone in Airplane mode with screen off, listen to voice prompts,and ride a very long time with OSMAND before needing external power. Used with an Edge 500 or similar for map and metrics display, you'll be done in no time with that solo double century. If it's over 12 hours, no worries, you've got that two port external battery pack available for your phone and bike computer.

noglider 

You can use any device, whether a bike computer, a smartphone, or whatever else you have. You'll just need to add an external battery. I've done century rides this way. You may want to bring two batteries. Test them to see how long they last before your big ride.

Skipjacks

The GPS isn't the biggest power hog. It's the screen brightness.

You can limit the GPS power use by using an app that only gathers your position data every 3 or 5 seconds instead of constantly. For biking purposes, that's fine. It may not give you ultra accurate speed readings at any exact moment, but for mapping and course tracking and overall average speed over 100 miles it'll be fine.

And if you leave the screen off the whole time and only hit the power button when you need to check something, most phones will handle a 12 hour ride just fine.

None will last 12 hours with the screen on constantly.

If you use a dedicated bike phone that you can put into airplane mode to shut down the cell radio it'll help even more. You can also shut down all sorts of other Android services that run in the background so they don't waste battery. (No need for email and calendar syncing, etc)

But you need the right phone. My bike phone as a 3700 mah battery. It does fine. I recently tried to replace it with a small phone that has a 2000 mah battery. That was a disaster and it didn't last long at all. With the 3700 mah battery phone my GPS updates ever 1 second and I leave the screen on and it'll give me about 4 hours. If I leave the screen off it'll last me 2 days with GPS running. (Not an estimate. I've run the GPS app and left it running to see what happens. It took 2 days to run down)

If you want to use your regular phone and don't need it on the handlebars to see constantly, as long as it's in your pocket with the screen off it'll last all day.

Seattle Forrest

Garmin Fenix 3 and 5 do turn-by-turn directions and get 20 to 24 hour GPS runtime.

noglider 

On my metric century ride this past fall, I connected my iphone 6S to an Anker Astro E1 battery. I set the screen to stay on constantly. By the end of the many-hour ride, the phone was at 100% and the Anker battery was nearly drained. That's perfect.

Skipjacks

Anker battery and power products are top notch. They work better than the originals and if you ever have a problem with an Anker product, there is no problem. They'll replace it. No hassle.

JohnJ80

That battery at 5200mAh capacity is right around 2 full iPhone battery charges. I suppose knowing how long the took, one could extrapolate to the battery capacity required to get to 200 miles at a given speed.

J.

noglider 

Right. I brought two of those batteries and only needed the first one.

JohnJ80

If I did the math correctly, if the OP rode at the same pace you did, he'd need just under 6 iPhone charges (about the same for Samsung). So that would be 3 of those batteries you used and that should leave him with a fully charged phone. That's probably good margin in case he needed the phone to make an emergency call or something.

That's a lot of batteries to carry for the phone. If he were to use a bike computer with a 10 hour battery life, he'd probably need a lot less and maybe only that that is about half of one of those batteries you used.

J.

noglider 

Yup, true. Nothing is perfect. My approach is to reduce spending on gadgets, and I had the phone already, so I skipped the purchase of a computer. Actually, I had a Garmin, but I didn't like it, possibly because it was defective. And the external batteries are also a given for me. I have a humongous external battery I don't use any more. It could probably provide more than six charges, but it weighs one pound.

JohnJ80

Sure. Appreciated the data you had on battery consumption of the phone as a bike computer. Using that, the OP should be able to decide how he wants to proceed. 200 miles is probably pushing it for a phone. Might be worth borrowing someone's bike computer for the ride.

Half the fun of these things is figuring out all those little logistical issues.

J.

TimothyH

I saw a guy jumpstart his car with one.

noglider 

Haha, agreed, JohnJ80. I remember working on my list of things to pack. Also, I planned an elaborate route for my solo training ride.

TimothyH, are you joking? How can you start a 12 volt motor with a little 5 volt battery? You must be joking.

JohnJ80

Exactly. I think you have to be just a bit of a compulsive planner coupled with being a gear junkie to really enjoy this aspect of cycling. I know I am.

Don't you just feel like you killed it when you figure out some little thing like this and it works perfectly?