The Units

Over the years I realized that besides loving everything on two wheels, that I have a small obsession with GPS units.

The GPS 3 was my first and I don't remember what store I picked it up from or what I paid for it. It was also mounted with a touratech system that I bought from cycoactive back in 1995. Looking back now it was so primitive and only showed interstate and had zero routing options. surprisingly the old girl still works and is on my buddys bike.  

The original Streetpilot mounted to a RAM system. Big clunky and orange. I also had a touratech mount for this one but I can find the picture.

 

Next was my bargain Ebay special, the 2610 and my first unit that auto-routed. Love or hate it, auto-route at the least gave you some kind of idea when you might get to the hotel.

Then I had the a supernatural digitizer death that made me have to bail out of my trans-wisconsin trail trip. It actually in a weird way gave me the idea to buy broken 2610 units with good digitizers and swap them into the 2820 units that had bad digitizers. Buy a 2610 for 10 bucks and a 2820 for 35 bucks and flip out the screen and sell it for 150 bucks or more. I made some good money doing this till people stopped wanting them.

The 2820 was a really good unit and was just big like the 2610 and was my first with the NT map format. It had XM radio but people complained on how well it worked and would also need a bluetooth dongle to transmit in stereo to my motorcycle headset. 

 

The Zumo 550 and mount was also a Ebay special because it had a bad LCD screen. I put a screen and digitizer in it and it worked well. The XM was good but also need a dongle to transmit to the helmet. The bad part was the phone would not operate with dongle on. The day the unit came in the mail I happened to drop in a pawn shop and bought a zumo 550 for 9.99 and it worked great and found out the unit was never registered and Garmin gave me a free map update. I resold it for $290 and it made up the money. :)  

This is my current bargain, the Harley zumo 665 that I found on Craigslist. The ad was stating the guy only wanted $250 and I was trying to find what the scam was. With a few emails later and it seemed good so I rode up the Kenosha WI. on the fourth of july.  The owner just got it back from Garmin from a refurbish because the on/off button fell out somewhere between Montana and Wisconsin. He was selling it because he just bought a new HD that has navigation built into the bike. 

The XM works great and the weather and traffic is useful for living around Chicago.