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Reviews (1)
10 July 2007
Hope this helps a little
13 of 13 found this helpful I have had the Garmin Edge 205 GPS for a few weeks now. I have do mostly mountain bike riding on dirt single tracks in the Twin Cities metro area in MN, I have also done some in Northern MN.
Signal strength
After the GPS is turned on the signal is acquired extremely fast. The longest I have had to wait is about 30 seconds. I do a lot of riding through heavily forested areas with many hills and I have yet to lose my signal.
Display
The display can have (3) different screen displays on it, one of these containing the map. The other two screens can display up to 8 settings that are user defined at once. I have not had to use the map setting at all but it seems small and hard to read, but it leaves a bread-crumb trail and has a compass setting if you get yourself lost!
The displays are easy to read when you are stopped. I have a 5 displays on one of my screens and 8 on the other. The first with 5 displays have speed being the biggest of the sizes so I can easily read it while moving. It takes about half the screen but when moving the other 4 can be really hard to read. The speed and the distance work pretty well for being a GPS signal.
All the signals update every second so jumps around a little but if riding at a semi-consistence speed it is relatively accurate. Of course it is going to jump around if you are constantly changing speeds... I only mention this because of other reviews say this is a poor feature.
Computer Plots
*GPS mapping
The maps are nice to see where you have gone. It takes a few seconds to put the information onto the computer after a trip. This is a nice feature. A dot is recorded every second. This allows seeing exactly where you turn.
*Elevation/Speed/Grade/Pace plots
When looking at the trip you can plot any or all of these at a time. It is nice to see the elevation vs speed. With the software the plots can be adjusted but sometimes hard to read. For mountain biking since there are so many hills and I am changing speeds so frequently that if gives me an idea of where some of the big hills are.
Overall
I am very pleased with buying this. I am much happier with this than if I would have bought a wireless bike computer that mounted on my bike.