Bonneville America Forums Forums Technical Forums Accessories Zumo 450 Observations

salient points after three trips to work…in order of awareness/revelation
Post posting added comments appear in italics and are underlined.

Power Cable Ends
Bare wires at power side. Need to solder appropriate power plug on. Or direct wire to the battery. Route cable under tank.

Power
Only from cradle or usb cable to puter. Accessories can be purchased to allow full range of power options. Rechargeable battery power when no external power is supplied. July 16, 09: The m/c power cradle has a cover for the mating power pins. A rubber cap covers these when the unit is removed. The cover kinda flops around when the unit is mounted in the cradle. However, one morning I noticed that the cover was stuck to the under side of the mount. Hum, magnets are great things. The cover is made with an imbedded magnet! Nice touch

Side Vision
omg. Looking at the display you can readily discern side roads that could be alternate routes. The map view shows bodies of water that you never see from the road, detail of neighborhood layouts, coast line contours. Being as how I live among three rivers, one creek and the Atlantic Ocean, most through routes orient N/S. Being able to see left and right of the mapped route, is priceless.

Auto Route Recalculation
The heck with this suggested turn! … As soon as you turn off the route zumo calculates for you, zumo updates the current route based upon your meanderings. This feature can be turned off though I have yet to see a reason to do so.

Security Screw
Vibrates tight. pita, but necessary to anally ensure zumo won’t fall out of cradle July 2, 09: the security screw vibrated counterclockwise and is now m.i.a. & July 16, 09: Purchased and installed a thumb screw in place of the security screw.

Route Preferences
Faster Time
Shorter Distance

Avoidances
(individually on or off: Or your selected choices as a group, on or off)
U-Turns
Highways
Interstates
Does what is says
Toll Roads
Error. Beachline is not a toll road until you cross into Orange County.
Traffic
Ferries
Carpool Lanes
Unpaved Roads

Fuel Gauge
Okay enter miles per tank. Well if ya are trekking great. But to be accurate, the unit has to be in it’s cradle every moving moment. Locally that taint gonna happen.

Mp3 Player
mp3? Common. Play acc or wma files!
Can only use if the unit is in a garmin cradle as that is where the jack is at for the headset/ear buds. To have a decent library ya need an SD card. Max size is 4gigs.
Yeah now the good stuff. Volume control at your finger tips instead of inside your jackets left pocket. July 8, 09: Random play mode is available. Display screens lists all the song information. Good sound too. Bad stuff now. Playlist have to be imported. Need to get a cable extension that can be routed under the tank so as not to be obvious to leos. July 16, 09: The unit has a 1,000 song limit. The mp3s go onto an SD card or the internal memory. If using the SD card beware that root entries are bad. Why? The unit takes forever to boot up when the root directory on the SD has lots of files. To prevent this inordinate bootup length of time, create a sub directory off of the root and call it MP3 or whatever. Then you can even create a sub directories for each Artist off of the MP3 directory.

Voice Commands
What a f’in annoyance. Each approach and each turn and each post-approach has a voice. When listening to the mp3 player, the music is muted so you can hear the voice commands. Will be great when I am in the bowls of a strange city, but when you have to turn every block or so what a piece of crap. If it could be disabled then beauty would be where turds where. July 2, 09: Using the volume control the feature can be turned off by reducing the volume level below 10.

Need ear buds to hear. Not audible from unit.

Wow... those things can do all of that? The only experience I've had with one was when a friend visiting me in Africa (once lived there) brought one over. But that was 12 years ago and I remember feeling rather indifferent about the device. Sounds like the technology has evolved a lot since then. Pretty cool info here Moe.

moe...nice write up!

I'll keep adding comments within the initial post as new observations/tips/tricks are learned...Already started with July 2,09 comments.

Doooood, GPS!!! WTF, I don't even take a map with me. I though you were some sorta worldly explorer type. But alas. your true colors shine through.
Maps, we don't need no steenkin' maps.

I got a Tom Tom for my birthday

I use a Garmin Quest. All the same features sans MP3 and a bit smaller screen. They do come in handy every once in a while.

Cabelas was selling Tom Toms for cheap a while back, so I got one for my wife. Incredible technology, although they are, as we know, far from perfect, like sending us 30 miles off course near Charleston, SC. As we passed the correct exit offen 26, I was thinking, "Geez, that was a good way to go last time I was here..."

sounds functionally identical with my 550 except for bluetooth which I don't use. I also never use the MP3 or voice stuff on the bike - too much hassle to hook up for the odd time that I'd use it.

My 550 came with a car cradle as well as the bike cradle.

I do religiously use the safety screw, I keep the little driver handy on the bike.

The detour button absolutely ROCKS! Use it for side trips along a route or when, like in the two cases Greg and I had on 84 then 81, a detour is essential!

Mapsource is a software that allows creation of a route on your puter, then a download to the garmin. Brilliant stuff. Ya can also create routes at the unit level. For true back road routes set navigation parameters to Shorter Distance, avoiding toll roads and interstates. Then select a point along your desired route. This will give ya the back roads for sure. Setting the destination in one fell swoop will tend to route ya on moe major highways. Key word: Incremental. Choosing the fell swoop technique, an incremental effect can be implemented by inserting way-points in between the start and destination. Setting incremental way-points is strange. First ya have to create a basic route and save it. At lease Garmin names the route for ya. Then you have to go to the main map and save way-points as favorites. Then edit the route, inserting the favorites. This approximates the results of mapsource.

I'm looking at the odometer on my 450 and it reads 04283.5 miles. I had lot's of time to spearment with it while rolling.

This devise is brilliant. this past 4300 miles i have traveled on more remote paved roads than I think I have the past 100,000 miles. (Well maybe not but ya catch my drift).

Regarding the mp3 player. There is something sureal about hearing Ricky Scaggs on mountain twisties, Janis Joplin while rolling through rural farm fields and then hearing ole blue eyes belting out NY NY when rolling NE from just east of milford pa.

Hi All,

New guy on the block. Just got an 09 Speedie. Really liking it so far. Head and shoulders above the V-Star 1100 I traded. On to the reason for my post. I just thought that if you guys didn't know there is a great site for the Zumo 450, 550 and the new 660 at:

http://www.zumoforums.com/index.php?action=forum

This is a free forum.

Frank