Zumo 660 GPS for my Yamaha Vity Scooter

I'm not a big fan of blinging vehicles and generally prefer to keep them as minimalist as possible, same as my house. On the other hand I am a big of adding accessories with function and utility. The first thing I realised within the first one week of riding my new scooter and getting hopelessly lost in London repeatedly was that I really needed a GPS. Unfortunately it is not easy to use a regular GPS on a scooter for a number reasons like

1. The GPS needs to be waterproof

2. The regular windscreen suction holders can be used on the instrument panel but are useless as they come off on bumpy roads

3. The GPS needs to have bigger buttons to allow gloved hands to operate it

4. The GPS needs to have superior shock absorption capability due to being jerked around more on a motorcycle than in a car

Due to this, there is a separate range of motorcycle GPSs, which cost about twice as much as car GPSs. The leaders seem to be the the Tom Tom Rider and the Garmin Zumo. I bought the Garmin Zumo 660 as it had better reviews on Amazon and was the most recent of them so likely to have the fewest bugs.

This is what the Zumo 660 looks like:

The Zumo fits on to the handlebars using a ram u-bolt fitting which comes with the Zum.

This is what the Zumo mount and the RAM u-bolt fitting look like:

 

This is what the Zumo 660 looks like after being fit to a bike (not my bike!)

Having the GPS has massively improved my riding experience, my average journey time is now about half of what it used to be. This also means that I am looking forward to making slightly longer journeys to the outskirts of London and neighbouring counties once spring comes around. Need to prep out my scooter to do longer journeys. Not sure what that involves actually. In India people seem to be quite happy doing fairly long journeys on regular journeys and motorcycles. In the UK however, there is a whole different range of touring scooters and motorcycles, which are much larger than the regular sort and a lot more expensive. The regular (indian sized) scooters and motorcycles here seem to be confined to urban commuting.

One thing I do need to do is find alternative power supplies for my GPS. The Zumo 660 has a Lithium battery with ~6.66Wh (1.8Ah @ 3.7VDC) of peak storage capacity. To be conservative, let's use 6Wh of usable power. The Zumo 660 runs at ~3W of power usage (surprisingly low), which means that the GPS only ever runs for ~2 hours on its own battery, which needs to be supplemented for longer journeys. Now Garmin seems to have thought about this because the motorcycle mount includes a pair of bare wires which can be connected to an alternative power source, which would have to be DC and >3.7V. It seems that the mount is meant to be connected to the motorcycle battery (12VDC) so that it is powered off the motorcycle's alternator and can effectively keep going as long as the motorcycle is running (as long as the alternator is producing enough power - otherwise I would just be draining the battery).

Challenge for me now is to connect the GPS to the scooter battery. I could take it to a workshop to get it done, but where's the fun in that?

[First published 28 January 2010]