Land's end to John O'Groats

Margaret's bike is an Orbit, Dave's is a Dawes Galaxy.

Rather than carry about 40 Ordnance Survey maps, we've planned our route using the Memory-map software. We then download the maps and routes to a Mio168 PocketPC which comes complete with built in GPS. (We bought the Mio from Global Positioning Systems who were very helpful.) One of the problems with using a PocketPC when cycling is keeping it dry/safe. I experimented with various methods. Firstly, tried using an Aquapaq and strapping this to the top of a bar bag, but this wasn't very stable and it was also hard to squeeze the extra battery into the bag. I also looked at, but didn't try out an OtterBox, but this doesn't have room for extra batteries. In the end, the best solution seemed to involve cutting a hole in a piece of plywood and which then fits snuggly into the map holder on an Altura bar bag:

   

The PocketPC keeps dry inside the map holder, and it's still possible to scroll and pan with a finger. Of course the GPS keeps track of exactly where you are, so there's never much need to do anything other than look at it and check that we are still on the route that has been marked out. It's also possible to get it to show you how many miles you've done so far, and how many are left.

A second problem is to be able to view the screen in bright sunshine. I've still got to design a sun-shield, but this should be possible because the whole thing is pretty stable on top of the bar bag.

One other problem is with battery life - with a GPS running, you can't expect more than a couple of hours before needing to re-charge. We resolved this by getting a battery pack and adapter cable from here and then fixing that to the back of the plywood board:

With 4 AA 2500 mAh batteries, we get about 6 to 8 hours, even with the screen on full brightness all the time. I'll probably try and put 2 battery packs on the board before we set off.

Since we will have batteries for the GPS, our camera and lights, we need to be able to charge several sets of batteries per evening, which means using a fast charger. The smallest/lightest suitable battery charger we could find was this one:

We don't need to take the separate charger for the Mio168, because it gets charged up by the 4 AA batteries.

The maps are all rather big, about 350Mb for each region, and I've found that I need 2 x 2Gb memory cards which are a little expensive (but becoming much cheaper now 4Gb SD cards are available). The other problem is that the software, particularly on the PocketPC is really only designed for "short" routes. It was necessary to split the route into single days, and at the end of each day, clear all the routes/tracks and then load the next day's route.

The final issue is that if anything goes wrong, we would need to buy a replacement PocketPC pretty quickly! Software / system crashes (remember, this is Windows...) are more easily coped with. There's a backup of the system image on each of the memory cards, and it is easy to test this by doing a complete reset of the PocketPC and then a restore.

I discovered recently that it's not a good idea to start cycling before the GPS finds satellites. You need to be stationary or it will never lock in!