Electronics, Lighting, & Gadgets - Can a Garmin do these things...

Can a Garmin do the things I would want in a GPS cycling aid? Specifically, the following functions would have to be easy and convenient:

Course programing, with directions at each turn. All too often I pedal merrily along only to find out that I am inadvertantly on the 50 mile route instead of the 100 mile route. I was following the pack, and never saw the course split. I find out that the course split was rather far back, and without some sort of detailed map I can't get back on it easily. I hate cue sheets, I want a map picture to follow instead. If Garmin isn't any good at this, then I guess I will have to get a cue sheet holder with bifocal cycle glasses.


Route me home, with the ability to avoid certain roads. Sometimes I go out and wander. At some point I will begin to wander back towards home. Frequently, I will end up needing to know exactly how to get back to my starting point without taking the interstate or a gnarly state route. Currently I carry a folded road map, and stop to study it. I wouldn't want to use a 2 inch gps map to plan a route, so the computer would have to be good at finding the way.

I tried thumbing through the Garmin thread, but I got a greater sense of how the units can go wrong rather than what they can do for me. The Garmin website isn't helping me much.

What do you think? My birthday is coming up, and it would seem I might have been good enough the past year to get one of these things.

The higher end Garmins, like the Edge 705 can do on-the-fly turn-by-turn routing.
The lower end Garmins are mostly training tools that record your data and let you download them to a PC after the ride so you can analyze your performance.

Yes, I should have been more specific. I was looking at the 605 or 705. I can leave my current speed and cadence computer on my bike, or think about getting a garmin one and moving my Mavic computer over to another bike.

I am most concerned with how easy it is to do course planning on a PC, and then get it onto the bike unit. Aslo, it has to be good at telling me where I am and getting me home when I wander.

I wonder if having a Garmin 605 will make my cue sheet following, map reading skills go the way my spelling skills did when word processors came out? But then again, I hate cue sheets and they are usually in my back pocket where they do me no good anyway.

My experience with Garmin route software is that the routing algorithms in the Mapsource PC software and in the handheld units are not the same. As a result, it is common for the two to generate different routes for the same set of waypoints. the best way to circumvent this is to be a bit liberal with placing waypoints so the routing has little choice but to go the way you want.

As far as getting you home from your wandering via a good cycling route, my experience is that Garmin doesn't necesarily agree with me regarding what rads are good for cycling. Since there is no consensus among even cyclist on this point, it's probably not surprising that Garmin's "bicycle" route setting in their handheld (don't know about the 705) would not generate a route that I consider optimum. So, ultimately, it's best to have some knowledge about the area roads so you don't get routed down some gnarly state highway. BTW, Garmin doesn't seem to know the difference between a low traffic state highway and a gnarly one.

I have the 705 and it will do both. The device is very powerful and if you have never used a GPS before there will be a very steep and frustrating learning curve but they will do it.