Motorcycle GPS: Garmin GPSmap 62s

Motorcycle GPS – Garmin GPSmap 62s
Slow and steady wins the race

This could be said about Garmin’s handheld GPS innovation strategy and also said about the Garmin GPSMAP 62S . More on that later.

Garmin has been the leader in personal navigation devices. While the portable car GPS market is now more fragmented the handheld GPS market is split between Garmin and the disruptive smartphones.

I would love to be able to use my iPhone on my motorcycle. There are many reasons why I don’t:
– I’m concerned about its ruggedness. Mororcycles vibrate, bump, and rattle. I am not convinced that the iPhone could stand up to that for any length of time.
– Motorcycles are exposed to the elements. Smartphones in the US are not typically water proof.
– I haven’t found a way to preload both maps and routes into an iPhone app. Some of the best roads for a motorcycle are where no data connection can be found. Being able to both preload maps and routes is farely critical for me.
– I wear gloves when I ride. The iPhone’s capacitive screen does not respond to leather gloves and I don’t think it’s worth it to buy special gloves or finger covers to make my gloves compatible with the iPhone.

For those reasons I choose to pay extra for a dedicated GPS unit. I choose however to purchase the GPSmap series instead of the Zumo series due to the significant cost savings. The GPSmap devices are roughly half as expensive as their Zumo cousins.

Maps. Maps is where Garmin excels and struggles. Their map data is quite good, they lease the data from NavTeq. Their map licensing is where Garmin is stuck in the age similar to when Mp3 digital music first appeared on the Internet and the big record labels freaked out and tried to lock everything using Digital Rights Managament (DRM). Garmin ties each map license number to a single device. This means that if you loose or upgrade your device you are out of luck. What’s equally bad is that buying the downloaded version of the maps to out on my GPSmap device means that I can not use these detailed maps for route planning in my computer unless the device is plugged in to the USB port. Map upgrades are almost as expensive as new maps and in the car navigation segment it is often the same price to buy a completely new device as it would be to upgrade the maps.

The GPSmap series comes with a very basic, practically useless, map pre installed. These maps do not work for navigating on or off road as they basically tell you where the statelines are and that’s about it.

After installing the City Map the 62s does a fine job of navigating you to your destination. In my recent trip where I had a 500 mile long route I wanted to follow the initial calculation took upwards of a minute. After the initial calculation though it was very responsive until I missed a turn and it would need to recalculate. Sometimes this happened quickly one time I decided to make a new route from scratch it was taking so long.

Having owned the predecessor 60csx I can assure the 62s is faster and with a better screen. The tones are significantly quieter and I ended up turning mine off as they were useless on the motorcycle. To navigate I relied on the map with the Distance to Next data to inform me of upcoming turns.

Over all I am very pleased with the hardware and map quality. The software is lacking yet still adequate.

I highly recommend the Garmin GPSMAP 62S as a motorsports GPS due to its ruggedness and relative value over the Zumo series. It also has the benefit of doubling as a hiking or off road GPS.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *