Where are sat navs at?

Know where you’re going? Great. If not, get a sat nav

Bike sat navs are, let’s face it, bloody expensive. Especially when you look at the price of a unit designed for a car. They justify the price by being waterproof, vibrationproof and robust enough to survive being dropped as clumsy owners take them off (not RIDE readers, obviously). They also come packed with additional features – MP3 players, service logs, on-the-go fuel gauges and, of course, the ability to connect to a Bluetooth headset and your phone to make and take calls while riding.

That, of course, is the biggest problem facing sat navs right there: the phone. Every year smartphones get smarter, packing their own navigation tools into the device most of us have with us all the time and are already paying for. There are dedicated sat nav apps (including one from Tomtom) and you can get waterproof cases that will charge phones so they don’t die at a crucial point in a journey. That may leave the sat nav hiding behind pleas that it doesn’t slay your data allowance and it keeps working in remote areas with no phone or 3G/4G coverage.

For us, the sat nav does still – just – have an advantage over the phone for touring. Planning the kind of complex, indirect routes used for bike tours tends to be easier and more intuitive with the planning software that supports sat navs than it is on most phone apps, which are great for plotting routes from A to B but not so hot on stringing together a convoluted path.

Better still, if you don’t have time to plan your own trips, the latest bike sat navs can find their own interesting routes between A and B or plan circular routes. One of them even comes pre-loaded with a heap of touring routes.