Zumo

Local BMW friend Charlie is selling accessories on the R12000GS he bought for his wife earlier this year.

(If you’ve been following this blog, you may recall that I drove down to Louisiana with him in early January to complete the transaction and trailer the bike home.)

Among the accessories his wife didn’t want was a Garmin Zumo 550 GPS unit with the optional XM radio receiver. I offered to take it off of his hands and he brought it over yesterday afternoon.

Happily, it (A) slips right in to the R.A.M mount that I had installed a couple of summer ago for my Garmin Nuvi 200W. The mount for my now defunct XM Roady II satellite radio and antenna works nicely as a platform for the Zumo’s XM receiver (B). At present, I’m using a BMW-style power plug to connect it with the outlet on the fairing dashboard. Eventually, I want to have it hard-wired into the bike’s electrical system as was the 6-volt power cord for the XM Roady II, but I think I’ll leave that up to the pros.

I did, however, get the XM receiver activated and deactivated the
Roady that I installed last August to replace a unit that drowned in a rainstorm. Unfortunately, the replacement unit never did function properly. The XM folks generously waived the activation fee for the Zumo XM unit, since I was never able to use the Roady I tried to put into service last August.

If I didn’t have a plate full of writing assignments for the next couple of weeks, I’d be tempted to reconsider my decision not to ride to Bike Week in Daytona Beach, just to play with the new equipment.