By Homer Ashburn

THE motorcycle road trip. Almost anyone with a big bike has been bitten by this bug.

It's the call of the road, the wide open spaces to new vistas.

It's a trip to feed the soul and to be one with the two-wheeled extension of your body. It's a recipe for frustration and helplessness if you're not good at reading a road map.

It's nothing to be ashamed of. Not all of us are blessed with being able to make out what all those straight lines, coloured blocks and grid numbers mean.

Even professional adventurer Charlie Boorman admitted to hassles with deciphering the map strapped to the tank of his Paris to Dakar bike ... and this is a man who's ridden a bike around the world and from Scotland to South Africa.

Closer to home, a friend of mine who took part in a mass motorcycle ride to Thailand found himself in what felt like the back end of the universe because of technical glitches with his paper map, i.e. the road names on the map and the road signs in the physical world did not quite match up.

Sound familiar?

Technology, it seems, is the saviour. Like its four wheeled brethren, there are sat-nav alternatives for motorcycles.

Perhaps, the options are limited (and in some cases more expensive) but, for the map challenged, there are now options.

A-list options

Let's start with option one: sat-navs designed for motorcycles. These are the ones most bikers would probably want from the get-go.

These puppies are tough, weatherproof, come with anti-glare and, most of you who ride know this, have touchscreens designed for gloved fingers.

A Google search will show that there are quite a few models available in the global market like Becker, Magellan, Adventura TwoNav, So Easy Rider, TomTom and Garmin.

However, here, it seems that Garmin is about the only one in town that has sat-navs for bikes and only two models, the Zumo 500 and Zumo 550, are available. There's no price listed for the 500 but the 550 is almost RM3,700.

There's a high-end Garmin available on BMW motorcycles that come as an optional extra but with no price tag available.

The second option is the portable GPS unit.

There is no shortage of these in the market and they come with a range of price points that can suit most, if not all budgets.

Mounting them, however, can be a problem, with many of them proving to be vibration-happy, making reading the screen a tad difficult.

They're also designed to be primarily used in cars, so there's no anti-glare and they aren't designed to be used with gloved fingers.

It's not all doom and gloom, though,

Another Google search indicates that there are after-market brackets and mounts, like the ones made by firms like Touratech that can help with the vibration problems.

Jacks of all trades

Portable sat-navs also seem to be the most popular option, if the few local and Singaporean biking forums I visited seemed to indicate. It's certainly a cheaper option when compared to getting a made-for-biking GPS unit but, again, keep these portable sat-navs away from the rain, forget about using them in bright sunlight and get used to taking off your gloves when using them.

The third and final option is to make use of smartphones with GPS capability.

While most will think that this is probably the worst option of the lot, with perceived slowness in processing GPS information amongst other problems, the fact that the Long Way Down team of motorcyclists used Nokia 6110 Navigator mobile phones to navigate their way from Scotland to South Africa successfully indicates that these PDA/mobile phones can be a good option.

The other advantages are, of course, being able to use the phone and SMS function as well as being able to check your emails, surfing the Net, taking photos, listening to music, watching/taking videos and all the other plus points that modern smartphones are capable of offering.

Of course, processing speeds will probably not be as fast as dedicated sat-navs and the same problems faced by portable GPS units - not weatherproof and not designed for gloved hands - will also plague users of this option.

Once you've selected which option best suits you, there are other considerations that need to be taken into account, like the battery life of your sat-nav.

There are apparently several options ranging from replaceable AA or AAA batteries that can last up to six hours right up to integrated rechargeable batteries that can be charged when you reach your destination.

Another consideration is whether or not the sat-nav comes with Bluetooth options.

This is especially useful when you consider that GPS audio directions cannot be heard above the roar of the motor and the wind, especially when you're wearing a full-face helmet.

These units come with audio/headsets and/or speakers, allowing the rider to get the spoken turn-by-turn directions that us car users take for granted.

Of course, the final consideration is that, at the end of the day, sat-navs are not infallible.

There's an interesting story online about a South African journalist who, having not set the options properly on his sat-nav, ended up driving into the great outdoors for almost 12 hours through terrain not designed for anything less than a 4x4 just because his sat-nav told him to.

The moral of the story?

Bring those paper maps just in case.

--The Star/ANN