UKH

Interested in people's experiences with GPS devices or mobile apps for planning road bike routes. I've used Google maps a bit and had problems with lost connections and with it sending me down dirt tracks and muddy lanes when I'm on a road bike.

Ideally I'd like to choose a destination and have it map me a route (or few I could choose from) that would be suitable to do on a road bike, obviously it's not gonna be perfect but at least if it had this as a feature I could look at the route and tweak it.

Not bothered about anything other than being guided on roads I don't know, don't really care about the bells and whistles of storing route data, although I guess a lot of them do this anyway. Suspect it would be useful to be able to play about with the route on a laptop first though, cheers.

In reply to Matt Vigg:

I use ridewithgps with pretty good results (the odd trail included where I want concrete only, but it's reasonable and can be edited).

You can then either follow on a smartphone, or upload to a GPS unit (I use a wahoo elemnt which is really good, but not cheap).

In reply to Matt Vigg:
We use Copilot GPS app for car satnav but voice guidance dies after end of free trial.

Never tried it for cycling, logging route or connecting to latop.

In reply to Matt Vigg:

I usually use strava, you need to plan the route on the website and follow it on a phone or export the GPX its pretty good at keeping to the roads.

In reply to all:

Cheers all, I'll check out the mobile apps first and see how it goes.

In reply to Matt Vigg:
i tend to plot routes on garmin connect now, simply because it then keeps them on the app on my phone (you have to plot on the desktop site) and can directly upload to your garmin device from your phone. Because i have bikes in two places (home and work) sometimes I'd plot a route at home on ridewithgps that I wanted on my work garmin and forget to upload it, so having them on my phone is easier. I also can't work out how to plot a gpx on rwgps and import into garmin connnect, which means i have to plug the device in to upload. Connect does it via BT.

I also have route buddy atlas that gives me os maps on phone and tablet (downloaded to the device) to check that what i've plotted is a road - google and other maps sonetimes shows a manky gravel farm track in Warwickshire (work rides) as a road, so it's good to be able to check. The west midlands area (which covers Brum, Cov, Leamington and a fair chunk of Cotswolds) was a tenner for all devices, the whole of the north of england at 50k was about £25 i think. Useful as a nav aid anyway as it'll show you where you are and give you a uk gr as well.

In reply to andy:

Ta, you're the second person in the last week to recommend the OS maps so will definitely get a copy of them.

In reply to Matt Vigg:

Top tip - buy your Route Buddy maps on your desktop version as it seems the desktop licence allows you use them on phone/tablet but the opposite doesn't seem to apply.

In reply to Matt Vigg:

I've given up with automatic route planners. I use BikeHike to plot a route, which gives you a side-by-side comparison with an OS map and I then download those to my Garmin. UK only