GPS stuff and preparations for the Autumn Equinox Rally

It's a whole year since i went to Wales with the ADVrider.com folk for their Autumn Equinox Rally. I made some good friends there and have enjoyed riding with them since, especially in Italy this year. I am going to take the TTR on my new trailer this time and I set off tomorrow morning. It's the ideal bike for greenlaning and as my wrist is sore, I shall appreciate the lighter bike to handle.

Stemming from my promise to lead some of the Knobblies crew along the Kent lanes, I have been investing a lot of time and money on maps and GPS stuff. (OK I am a gadget freak and I know a real man would look at the clouds, the sun and find his way anywhere but I need all the help I can get and I just love the neat stuff that's available now. After toying with several ideas, I finally plumped for a Satmap Active10 GPS unit to use off-road. It's the only one to display real OS maps on a screen that is of a decent size. You can plan routes and track your position on the screen just as if you were working with a paper map and it's bloomin' marvellous. You can program routes on the PC and retrieve tracks etc as with most units and this works perfectly with the included software - provided that you have a Windows PC. There is no Mac software for it yet but I find it works just fine with Windows running under VMware. It's not a cheap unit and the maps are expensive, especially in the 25k series but it beats the Garmin offering hands down. Garmin Topo maps are crap in comparison and whilst one could happily navigate with the Satmap as one's only aid, the Garmin requires a paper map to make sense of its screen presentation.

An ancillary purchase has been the Columbus V900 GPS data logger that can record umpteen million track points. I got this because it was very well reviewed and I was fed up with my regular GPS units (Tom Tom and Garmin Street Pilot 2820) losing data as they filled up. The Columbis is tiny and is small enough to fit in a breast pocket and remain quite unnoticeable.

I shall try to find time to write up my conclusions about this stuff properly and in more detail as I think they could be useful to someone and I did spend a lot f time and money on the hardware I have bought and the time taken to investigate what was available and useful. This weekend will be a good cgance to give the new purchases a workout and please don't blame me for taking a bunch of OS paper maps that I also bought recently - I have always been a bit belt and braces when it comes to travel.

Another "incident"

Out with the TRF again and the TTR was performing brilliantly - so well in fact that my riding was definitely entering the exuberant category. Unfortunately, I chose the moment to be particularly exuberant as I skidded round a bend on a forest track only to encounter (would you believe it?) - a tree! Classic object fixation followed and I hit it. Bike not hurt, tree only lost a bit of bark, I damaged my right wrist in a manner as yet unknown. I did carry on riding for a bit but I am not sure this was sensible (two weeks from now and I am still hurting!). Still the riding was fun and the TR guys are good value so no real complaints. This accident has caused me to add "Injury" to my list of categories for Blog Posts!

Ride to Folkestone

I joined my Knobblies chums for a ride down to Folkestone. we had good weather and travelled some nice roads on the way



I took the F800 which ran sweetly and the TKC80s are still in reasonable condition after the Italian trip, although I will likely change them before any longer excursions.



I appreciated the biker friendly attitude at the Cliff Restaurant!