Garmin Edge 205 Handheld GPS Receiver

have had the Garmin for a few weeks now. I have do mostly mountain bike riding on dirt single tracks in the I.O.W. area

Signal strength
After the GPS is turned on the signal is acquired extremely fast. The longest I have had to wait is about 30 seconds. I do a lot of riding through heavily forested areas with many hills and I do not lose my signal.

Display
The display can have (3) different screen displays on it, one of these containing the map. The other 2 screens can display up to 7 settings that are user defined . I use the map setting but it seems small and hard to read, but it leaves a bread-crumb trail and has a compass setting if you get yourself lost!

The displays are easy to read when you are stopped. I have a 5 displays on one of my screens and 7 on the other. The first with 3 displays have speed being the biggest of the sizes so I can easily read it while moving. It takes about half the screen but when moving the other 2 can be really hard to read. The speed and the distance work pretty well for being a GPS signal.

All the signals update every second so jumps around a little but if riding at a semi-consistence speed it is relatively accurate. Of course it is going to jump around if you are constantly changing speeds.

Computer Plots
*GPS mapping
The maps are nice to see where you have gone. after a trip. This is a nice feature. A dot is recorded every second. This allows seeing exactly where you turn.

*Elevation/Speed /zoom/plots
When looking at the trip you can plot these . It is nice to see the elevation vs speed. but sometimes hard to read. For mountain biking since there are so many hills and I am changing speeds so frequently that if gives me an idea of where some of the big hills are.

Overall
I am very pleased with buying this. I am much happier with this than if I would have bought a wireless bike computer that mounted on my bike.

I use the GPS for my mountain bike excursions. There are a lot of websites in where you can find tracks. Simply choose a track, convert it, and download it on the Edge. In this way I can choose every day a different track.
The only drawback is that there are a lot of different standards for the track files, so sometimes you need to convert from one format to the format accepted by the Edge.
I use GPSBabel to convert the track file in gpx format and then Gpx2Crs to convert the gpx in crs, the format accepted by Edge.