Currently in Canada, 5000 miles away from my Fireblade and my Garmin Zumo satnav. Not awful though, as I am in a log cabin by a lake and contemplating first cold beer of the evening... I am wondering if I buy a cheap windows 10 tablet, can I download and use Garmin basecamp on it and then transfer maps to my Garmin? I have a micro USB to standard USB connector already, so I know that I could physically connect them (and also a micro mouse to help use basecamp). Then I could make up routes the night before when on trips, based on what the weather forecast says, rather than load them up before the start of the holiday. Or maybe even download routes from the Ride magazine route centre. Just wondered if this is technically feasible and if anyone actually does this already? All advice much appreciated!
Canada trip sounds ace. I have used the Garmin Road Trip part of the software, taking it with me on a MacBook Air. I have found that so much can be loaded onto the Garmin, that you can add whole countries - just in case you go there. What is really useful is to send Point of Interest to the Garmin. What I did was pull up all the campsites from Road Trip, save them as waypoints on the Mac, then send them to the Garmin. But you can do this before you go. This was more useful in my cycle touring days (speeding ban !), when the distances that you could travel every day were very small 50-80 miles. So you had to be aware of what was available ahead of you, as your options for riding around to find something were much less when you can only do about 10 mph ! I have used this system as described above on my old Zumo 220 for Motorcycle use, but now have a Tomtom - and I do miss not having this function with the Tomtom. I just find that so much detail can be preloaded on to the Garmin that I do not need to take the Laptop with me. And with the strike range of a sportsbike you can soon do 50 miles to find something easily, whereas on the pushbike you needed to be much more accurate about where stuff was located because you simply could not do an extra 50 miles to look for somewhere else ! So, for motorcycle use, especially if its a two week (or less) holiday, then I do not bother taking the laptop. But if I was setting off with no idea whatsoever where I was going, then it would be very useful. Also to consider suppose that a small tablet does not take as much space as a laptop. Hope this helps Planning the route through Switzerland to Italy
Never done it but the requirements of Basecamp don't seem to onerous. Biggest concern would be the CPU on the cheapie tablet, but as long as it is regular windows and not RT it should work. Caveat Emptor and all that though. https://www8.garmin.com/support/download_details.jsp?id=4435#Instruct
I have just bought a linx 1010b for this exact purpose. It was 150 quid with keyboard from amazon. It has a quad core, 2gb mem I stuck 128gb sd card in it. It runs win 10 I loaded Facebook TripAdvisor and base camp. Base Camp runs OK, not fast not slow, but it's enough to change a route en route....which is one of the reasons I use it for.
Took the plunge and just spent £40 on this: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Connect-T...102728?hash=item5d6415b508:g:LtsAAOSww9VXhOxM Downloaded Basecamp easy. Then Downloaded a gpx route file from the ride magazine website straight away, unzipped it, transfered it to my Zumo 390 right first time. Brilliant! Now I can download fresh routes when I'm on holiday if I have to divert by a few hundred miles to avoid weather (like keeps happening to me...). Tablet is absolutely perfect and dead easy to use. Need daintier fingers than mine on some parts of basecamp though, so might get a stylus thingy. Amazingly good value for £40!
