Orlov Vrh

I have used various means of navigating with my motorbikes but most have been aimed at adventure & offroad riding. To put it into perspective, it means lots of TET and occasional road navigation to get from A to B in an unknown city.

Here is how I progressed through various devices:
- It started with a basic Garmin Zumo on my old Africa Twin. I liked the Zumo, it was always powered, never ran out of battery, handled the rain and the vibrations and was clearly visible in the sunlight. What I hated was the following: really slow, just one type of map on it, needed a laptop to upload anything to it. I know there are newer devices mitigating most of just listed niggles but for the time being I am not going back to this type of device which I shall explain in a bit.
- Having moved from the Africa to the AJP PR7, the PR7 came with a Samsung Active tablet already mounted on it. While the tablet is now a flexible Android device with a larger screen, I had too many issues with it to really go back: charging would stop working, small droplets (not heavy rain) made it unusable as it went crazy, it was also quite slow and one could not take it out of the mount easily to take it with me to configure it for next day's riding.
- Having sold the PR7 for giving me a bunch of problems overall, I moved to Tenere 700 and did not want to spend lots of money on navigation anymore. So I mounted a Sony Xperia phone which took me through a recent 13000km ride of TET Spain and Portugal and I was very happy with it.

Here is the hardware set up:
- Phone: Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. It's my old personal phone so it did not cost me anything but it is quite old and outdated by today's standards but updates are still available for all the Google Play apps. However, it is IP68 water/dust resistant and it survived the trip. I had a spare Samsung Galaxy S8 with me that a friend gave me but I did not use it. Additionally, I had my main personal phone that I could use for navigation if both failed.
- Phone mount: Ram Mounts Quick-Grip Phone Holder (27EUR), see photo. I have tried other holders but really like this one for the following reasons:
--- It's flexible and can be adjusted to carry any average size phone (it cannot hold some really large ones I think).
--- Having done lots of pretty hard offroad the phone never budged. It stayed safely in place at all times.
--- It's easy and quick to put the phone in or take it out when leaving the bike unattended.
--- It's light. I have bought another steel holder with a lock but that thing weighs 600g which is just too heavy to put so high up on that tiny bar.
--- It mounts to any AMPS-compatible adapter (I am using the rally raid adapter https://www.rally-raidproducts.co.uk/yamaha-t7-… ).
- Charging cable: The importance of high quality cables is often overlooked. I used the following one: https://titanpowerplus.com/pages/titancable It's rugged and uses a 90degree charging plug design which handles lots of vibrations well. I used the short 0.5m one that costs 15EUR. I also had a spare with me I did not need.
- Remote control: Home made solution using cheap waterproof buttons and some resistors wired up to a standard headset plug of the Sony Xperia. This allows me to zoom in/zoom out the map without taking my hand off the handlebars. Worked wonderfully! You can read more about it here: https://www.tenere700.net/topic/2745-handlebar-…
- Good quality USB charger. I had two on the bike, a permanent waterproof one I bought online and a standard 12V socket one.

From a HW perspective, I find this setup great for the following reasons:
- It's cheap.
- It's light.
- And what is most important, it's a redundant setup using widely available parts. I had a spare phone (Samsung Galaxy S8) already preconfigured with the same setup as my Sony Xperia and could quickly replace it in my RAM mount if the Sony died. If the second one dies, I can walk into any store and buy another cheap Android phone, the RAM mount is flexible enough to support any average size phone. I also had two USB chargers on the bike, one permanent and one 12V socket one. When doing long travels off-road, redundancy is king.
- If I fall off the bike, my personal phone is still on me in case an emergency call is needed. I also carried a Garmin Inreach. The Garmin device broke after 2 days and I could not get it fixed until the end of the trip which is an additional reason I am not going back to Garmin. Not because of the poor Garmin quality but because this can happen and having an extra Garmin would be too expensive.
- Using your personal phone as navigation is a bad idea. Vibrations can easily kill phones so getting stuck without navigation and a phone connection in the middle of nowhere would really suck.

Now, let's move to the software side.
- As a base android home launcher, I use the Drive Mode Dashboard (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=c…). It came with the AJP PR7 tablet, I really liked it and it can be installed on any Android device.
- As a main navigation app I have now been using OsmAnd+ for years but did start out by trying a few different apps. It does a lot of things really well:
--- It's free (but I am so happy with it that I use a paid version now just to make sure the authors get a bit of credit)
--- It allows you to have as many offline maps installed as the phone memory allows you to. Besides the standard maps I also have Contour Lines installed which allows me to find my way out of a pickle when offroading. Or even better, make sure I don't get into one I cannot get out of. Quite important when you are riding solo offroad.
--- It records tracks.
--- It works with my external zoom-in/zoom-out buttons.
--- Customizable screen so you can pick what is displayed at all times (speed, elevation, distance to next marker, etc)
--- Can display multiple GPX tracks in different colours which comes handy when doing day-trips and having multiple options in the same area that I can then combine into a daily route.
- Track repository app: Google Drive. I have all the GPXs stored on my google drive. When I need to download another GPX to the phone, I simply share my phone's connection as WIFI or if I am at home I am already connected to WIFI in the garage. Same goes with recorded tracks, they get stored to the Google Drive which means I can view them, edit them or share them on my laptop.
- For on road adventures, I find the Kurviger app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=g… ) really good as it allows you to plan a trip through unknown twisty roads anywhere. It has a mobile app you can use on the fly or a desktop one for planning ahead.
- For turn-by-turn, Google Maps is still the best but I need to share the connection on my phone for it to work. OsmAnd+ turn-by-turn fails too often.

Hopefully this can come handy to others struggling to decide on their setup.Read more