I have said it often enough - but it stands another repeat, the single worst feature of the GP800 is its speedometer. It is illegible in MPH to any normal human. The numbers are too small and it really should not be necessary on a £6,500 bike to paint lines at 30mph and 50mph to ensure that you are within the speed limit of the multiplicity of "safety" cameras that blight this land. It's not as if Piaggio are a small importer, they are the biggest PTW manufacturer in Europe and are consistently the number four seller of bikes in the UK. The GP800 is their flagship product - if they can't be bothered to give it and accurately marked MPH speedo, they could have simply fitted a digital one. To add insult to injury, the accuracy of the speedo is appalling. On a journey where I was using the Nokia GPS Sportstracker feature on my mobile phone, I may have exceeded the speed limit by a small margin - the GPS tracklog showed I was travelling far slower than I thought I was.I had looked at replacing the speedo face - there's a place in Germany that will make the first one free but I couldn't face the amount of dismantling required to get to the speedo (or the loss of use of the bike while it was done) so I just kept moaning. There are also plenty of overlays that go above the instrument glass but I think that's too "cheap" a solution - I may change my mind as the bike gets older (and/or this country's persecution of speed gets any greater)
I had pretty much given up on a good solution when I happened to notice an "Indic8tor" on eBay. A little reseach showed that there were a number of these GPS speed camera detectors on the market (Indic8tor, Talex, Road Pilot etc - I won't link to them all, if you've found this blog you can probably use Google all by yourself :-)) . They are perfectly legal in the UK as they do not actually "detect" the cameras (Laser based camera detecters ARE illegal), they simply use a database of locations just like a normal SatNav.
What's more (a bonus for the dedicated cheapskate) these things start at around £50 complete with their first camera database subscription - and once that is out of date, they cost £50 per year to keep them updated. Once they are "Database Expired", they appear cheaply on eBay.
The Talex and Indic8tor looked good and their LED displays looked highly legible but a quick trip to Halfords revealed that their size might make fitting diffcult on the GP800. The Roadpilot MicroGO did however look just the ticket.A few days carefully watching on eBay and I picked one up for just £18 :-).
In a nutshell it's an excellent (if not quite perfect) solution. It fits neatly on the top of the dash and it's connected to a standard cigarette lighter socket fitted under the dash next to the battery (wired to the fusebox). The device has no internal battery at all so it is only powered up when connected.
The normal suction cup mount is screwed down and it's a pretty sturdy fit. It doesn't affect the movement of the electric screen in any way and the power lead drops down throught the screen mount slot.
when removed, the mount itself keeps the lead in place.
As soon as the bike is fired up, it switches itself on and starts searching for satellites. It seems slower to get a "fix" than my Garmin Nuvi 360 in the car but once it does lock on it seems to hold the signal perfectly well. As with all GPS devices, if you can't wait for the fix and start moving, the fix takes even longer. I tend to do this and it cakes up to 5 minutes to fix - I live with this - it's not as if it's my only speedo, its a supplementary device anyway. once it has achieved a fix it immediately tells you that the database has expired but you simply press the single control button and it goes to the speed display.
When moving, it does exactly what is says on the tin - it dispalys the speed in mph pretty clearly - and way better than the OE analogue speedometer. It catches up quickly with rapid acceleration (at least as good as a Citroen car with digital speedo) and slows down almost as fast.
It doesn't seem to vibrate too much (doesn't affect clarity) and the only effect of the vibtration is to caust the flip out antenna at the back to drop down. When this happens, the number of satelittes "seen" reduces but the lock is maintained. I just flick it back up when I notice it - but I may employ a high-tech piece of blu-tack in future.There is a problem with visibility in bright sunlight but I thing that's a result of the possitioning rahter than a fault with the unit. Having said that, it could do with a brighter backlight. The manual claims that it has a myriad of backlight colours to match - and these can be endlessly cycled through in the settings menu but to be honest (as the pictures show) it always seems to look like "LCD green/grey" whatever the setting.
It is much better in the dark where it does show a sort of washed out version of the orange backlighting of the GP800's centre LCD panel. I may look to ocnstruct a smple "hood" at some time in the future if the summer proves to be a good one.Of course it does also work as a speed camera detector. Even with an outdated database, it still warns of longstanding cameras (of course I am fully aware of their location anyway ) and if you wanted one of these for its stated purpose I'd say it does a good job. The screen dispalys both the speed limit and your speed and the diplay is flashing if you are over the limit. It does feature an audible warning which I suppose would be useful in a car but I have this switched off.
All in all, I'm very pleased.
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