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Pocket possibilities
Once you decide that viewing your route after returning home isn't enough and you have to see the map out on the trail, you'll need a pocket PC. The latest models are small enough and light enough to carry, with sufficient battery life to use all day. Reflective LCD screens give excellent viewing even in bright conditions, the new Compaq IPAQ has a particularly clear display and can be found for around £500. A lot of money, but far les than a half decent laptop and you could write it off as a business expense' Cheaper pocket PC's can be found as low as £300 that would do the job nicely. For those who think all this technology is a distraction from the ride, think again. A GPS will store the route you travel whilst sitting in the back of your rucksack. Struggling with paper maps may be fun, but when you can't work out where you are it's certainly a distraction from your riding. Then there are all those open access routes that can't otherwise be followed without a guide. Interested? We are. This year we're going to be out logging routes on GPS, you'll be able to download the data and use your GPS to show the way. The MM Navigator software will allow you to see our route on the OS map with your position constantly updated on top of it. Now get lost!

Video on your head
Obviously, to be a really outrageous Techno-Biker, you need a helmet camera. The good news is these tiny minor-miracles are quite affordable at only £105 including a microphone and all the cables http://www.rfconcepts.co.uk/helmet_cameras.htm However you do need a camcorder with an analogue input to record the signal. If you want a Mini-DV (the small ones') this will set you back over £1000. The cheaper alternative is to use an older Hi8 camera (borrow your dads?) or a Sony Digital8 which is a halfway house and can be adapted for analogue input.

Print Text! the whole feature in text only form.

The tiny helmet camera pictured with a penny to give scale

If you want to edit digital footage at full quality you'll need a fast hard disk and a Firewire card. We have a Pentium III with 512Meg RAM and two 30 Gig IBM Deskstar hard disks running as a RAID. This means that they share the data, in effect doubling the rate it can be written to disk. Once you have the video on your hard disk you'll be able to compress it for the web, throwing away some 95% of the data to go from a 200Mb to a 10Mb file. Better make sure your processor can handle it.
Remote recording
Of course it's a pain having to undo the rucksack to gain access to the camera and battery pack at either end of a filming session. So you'll need to run remote wired switches to both the helmet camera and your camcorder. The switch for the helmet camera is just a case of Maplins Electronics and a soldering iron. Fortunately for us the excellent http://www.datavision.co.uk/ sell a remote switch which will not only operate your recording, but has a cute little red light to tell you when recording is on, very BBC. We've mucked about with various mounting systems for the tiny helmet camera itself, but nothing seems to beat the 'zip ties and strips of rubber' we first thought of. Low tech is sometimes the best way'