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Garmin Edge 520 on my bike |
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The GPS wakes up and glows when it nears corners and then .... |
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reverts to an unlighted screen a bit later. |
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Some damage to the tailbox revealed .......... |
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after my training rides and before a planned new makeover. |
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Riding the Green Wedge Hills with the |
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GPS succumbing to a bout of confusion. After a long stretch of reading this crap you start imagining the thing is being very smug and saying "Of Course".. |
Hi
I've been getting my trike out on the road a bit and purchased a GPS so I could have a crack at a few more Audax rides including navigation. For me, buying a GPS is not like buying a book as using one started as a complete mystery. It doesn't come with an instruction manual and you need to get one from the internet
here or read it off the internet
here.
To demystify the GPS, I made a
blocky GPS route using ride with GPS on my computer. Then I loaded the route into the GPS (only the Garmin-supplied cable seemed to work transferring data), took it outside and had a crack. And everything worked fine, it told me how many k or metres to the next turn, and I did the route a couple of times.
After that, I booked into the 100k Audax Green Wedge Hills ride and 2 days before the ride did about 70k of riding of hills on the
Kew Boulevard without stopping. This was just what I needed, as the ride itself was quite hard. When I got back from the training, I'd intended to do another bike
makeover and put some lurid orange cut up t-shirts on the side, but this plan was cut short as I discovered some breaks in the wood of the tailbox. I'm not sure how this happened (as I was explaining to my wife's podiatrist today) however it might have been when I
banged into a tree while carrying a bike frame, or while carrying beer or something else. Anyway, after thinking about it, I didn't immediately fix the tailbox but instead just swapped it over for the other one I have, adding Ventisit seat padding to the swapped over tailbox. Bit of a test ride to my Mum and Dad's place, and the front bottom bracket was coming loose. Out come the BB tool, the big shifter and a length of pipe to tighten the BB. By this time I am a bit cautious and end up taking the 1 kg shifter and the BB tool with me on the ride.
The night before the ride I tried downloading the latest ride map as recommended by Audax email but really didn't check enough that the new route was in the gps.
Up early the next day and I got to the Eltham ride start in time but the new ride route wouldn't load, so I ended up loading the old route. Things went well (except for the enormous number of hills which I couldn't ride up because the front wheel drive was slipping and losing my Brevet card) until a long way into the ride when the GPS chucked a wobbly. I couldn't navigate after that and went about 10 k too far on the road before stopping and asking a farmer for the way back to the nearest big town, Hurstbridge. After asking a bike rider for directions a bit later, I headed off on the right road for "Hurstie" and got back on track. Slightly slow going from Hurstbridge, (there were still some hills) and I didn't have much oompf left having hardly stopped for the whole 100 or so k but got in to Eltham near the cutoff time of 2pm.
I emailed the ride organiser when I got home and registered a Thank You and Did Not Finish due to the lost Brevet Card.
So a few lessons.
* Get familiar with what happens to your GPS when you wander off track.
* Delete redundant routes before attempting to load up new ones and check that new ones are properly loaded before leaving your mapping computer session.
* Carrying maps as backup is a good idea. I didn't find any maps of suitable scale in my Melways or Vicroads books, so maybe screen dumps and a full set of ride directions from
ridewithgps would help.
* Training is good and 3 or 4 or 5 laps of the hilly Boulevarde track are all doable and worth it.
All for now, Regards
Steve Nurse