“I must create a System, or be enslaved by another Man’s.”  ~ William Blake

For more details as to “why,” see the Electronics Strategy section for more details.

GDMBR Electronic Gadgets

Music and Entertainment – Creative Zen Vision:M 30 GB MP3 Player and older analog AM/FM Walkman.  First, the Zen 30 GB player.  Excellent piece of equipment, the thing lasted through intensive pre-trip testing and is still going strong today.  I fit over 20 GB of music on it plus about fifteen audiobooks.  If set correctly (easy to do,) it will run through two full days of riding on one charge.  (Charging is a challenge; see more in Electronics Strategy)

Due to challenges with power supplies, I grabbed an old analog AM/FM Walkman from my bounce box in Whitefish.  This light, simple little gem will run about three riding days or more on one AA battery.  The problem comes when you are in an area too remote to pick up anything.

If I had it to do all over again, I would have loaded all my audiobooks up into my super, super light  Sansa MP3 Player and not carried the AM/FM walkman.  That little guy runs on 1 AAA and has an excellent FM radio function.  When combined with the Zen, I would have never been without tunes or audiobooks, period.  Seemingly minor now, but significant when riding over 2800 miles solo. 

Data Entry and Communication – HP iPAQ RX1950 Pocket PC WiFi enabled PDA. Small, light, and effective for the trip. I did all email and the majority of my blog postings with this tool.  Ports in SD memory cards for video, data, and photo management.   Excellent piece of equipment, the only flaw is the power on/off button tended to ghost activate (for some reason it did this more later in the trip) and drain the power.  No big deal, I just logged the data on a receipt or something and entered it whenever I got to a recharge point.  See more in Electrics strategy.

Camera – Panasonic Lumix DMC-LS70S 7MP Digital Camera Runs on AA batteries and stores data via SD and SDHC memory cards.  Not the lightest option on the market but the battery/SD card combo was what I was looking for.  I found that if you turned off all the extra bells and whistles, it still took good photos and didn’t zero out the batteries in 30 shots.

Cell Phone –  I carried my Motorola cell phone the entire route, every so often I might check just to see if I had service or voicemail, but other than that it was pretty much worthless.  Could be used in an emergency, I guess.  It ended up costing me some extra money in Canada that made me want to (accidentally) toss it into a river even more.  

Data Storage – I carried several SanDisk 2GB SD Memory Cards and one Sandisk 4GB SDHC Memory Card for interchangeable data storage and transfer. The GPS has a SanDisk Micro 2 GB Memory Card with full SD adaptor for tracklog storage and transfer, which I kept in my bounce boxes and never used. I carried an SD Card Readerthat ports in USB, which treats the SD card as a flash memory drive in any PC. 

Navigation- Garmin GPSMap 60CSx 2.6-Inch Mapping Handheld GPS. This AA powered little gizmo has a huge memory capacity relative to these type of devices and I had all the route area topos and the actual route (except for Canada) uploaded to it. I used it to keep track of mileage and run tracklogs to be evaluated after the trip. The GPS runs on 2 AA batteries and easily ran for two riding days or so on a set of batteries in “Battery Save” mode.  See Maps and Navigation  for more GPS info.

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