The agonizing choice has finally been made and the credit card has taken a big one for the team.

After much deliberation I decided to purchase the Garmin Quest from my buddies at Cycoactive. In addition to getting the GPS, they sell a nifty locking mount from Touratech, various Garmin software packages including European maps and a spiffy neoprene case to keep the GPS save when travelling.

Unfortunately, neither Touratech nor Garmin yet sell the vital DC power source. The Quest needs 5V DC for power so its not particularly easy to hack together my own solution. Both Touratech and Garmin claim they will have a 12V DC to 5V DC solution in the next few months. Probably not in time for my upcoming trip to Spain but it seems close enough to take the risk with the Quest.

In addition, the Quest is small enough to be more functional as a hand-help GPS for hiking and geocaching than the other models I was considering. The Quest also has a flip-out external antenna so it will hopefully have better reception than the other models. One downside to the Quest is that it doesn’t allow for memory expansion via plug-in cards but it does have 115MB of RAM which is enough to hold detailed road maps for a couple of states. The GPS comes with the American City Select package, I’m also getting the European City Select package and a topo/recreational package. That should give me maps for riding or hiking, both locally and when travelling.

I’ll try to post another blog update once I’ve actually has some time to play with the thing. In the meantime, I’m off to read the online manuals.

[image from the Cycoactive web site.]