On another thread on GPS units, someone said Garmin adv not to use the 2620 on M/C's as it has a hard drive, others said GPS city said ok...I hope you all that have these will keep us posted if there are any problems etc.
Two Lane, your installation looks good..do you plug into cig. ltr or run on battery?
Thanks
To kind of cover everyone's questions on the GPS thing here goes:
Without even beginning to question the hearsay or other problems that might be in play about using the max speed log on the GPS unit the unit itself doesn't log (at least not in a viewable fashion) WHEN that max speed was hit. So the only thing you really know from that display was that the bike had hit it's displayed highest speed sometime within the amount of miles in that log. Since you can't get a ticket today for speeding last week you should be ok.
Mrs. We, the navigation thing was a dream. Whomever designed the software for this thing really had their head on straight. What and when it displays for you are things you're going to want to know and when you're going to want to know them. Down in south Louisiana I was just kind of heading off "that direction" quite a bit without paying any attention to where I was going. Normally doing that would then require some time with a map to first figure out where I'd gotten to and how to get home from there. Not with HAL (that's the GPS unit's name, HAL as in from 2001). Save the hotel (or anything else) as a waypoint and then just tell HAL take you home.
Something I was suprised about was how nice it was even on a known route. Going home on Sunday over a route passed just a few days before it was still pleasant to have displayed a general map, all the time. Not because the map was necessary but because within the map display was info about how far to the next turn in the route, what the intersection would look like, how much time to someplace where you might stop. Instead of thinking (like we all do sometimes) "ah, I must be about an hour from that place I wanted to stop" or from the next turn off you KNOW it's 45 miles and 38 minutes away and you'll want to be in the left lane when you get there and it's exit 114. HAL is just pretty fracking cool.
As for the 2620 not holding up on the motorcycle; I'd been told the same thing (by a sales weenie) and also told it was ok. Those that told me it was ok seemed to be speaking from experience as opposed to spouting a compnay line. So that's the advice I chose to go with. The unit rode on the bar just over 2000 miles this past weekend and never skipped a beat. Rough two lane roads in Arkansas didn't faze it. Potholes didn't scare it. Rain didn't annoy it.
As for the hook up the bar mount is simple and very easy. The unit is on and off in less than minute. I did use the accessory power cord you can buy for these to hard wire them. That cord inlcudes an audio output connection. The "standard" power cable has a speaker built right on to it and that's how I've used the unit in the pickup.
But on the bike I wanted to be able to remove everything and not have a wire dangling from inside the fairing when it was off. So I took the accessory cable and shortened it and put a power adaptor plug on it that came from radio shack. It's fused, uses a mini-blade type fuse that can be changed externally, and with a bit of heat shrink and a couple of dabs of marine epoxy in the right places is just about weather tight.
The cable connection on the back of the GPS unit is captured by the motorcycle mounting hardware so you don't need to worry with it coming loose going down the road. That means, however, you'd have to remove HAL from his mounting hardware whenever you wanted to remove it from the bike if the cable were hard wired. That'd be an extra couple of minutes hassle everytime and just not worth it.
This way it just unplugs from the cig lighter/power port and you walk away with everything. It couldn't get easier or simpler. After having played with the audio function of the device in the pickup I was pretty sure it wouldn'tbe a big deal on the bike. The screen's presentation is good enough that while the audio prompts might be handy they really aren't necessary. And you don't have to be paying attention to the screen all the time to get the info. If you glance down at about the time you're going to want info HAL is probably displaying it. The software is just that good.
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