Advice please 'on in car navigation systems'

I use TomTom 5.1 on my XDA2 (a phone / pocket PC), and find it brilliant, would recommend it to anyone. A further advantage is that you can walk/cycle/sail/ drive around in another car with this type of setup.

I bought a GPS unit , bluetooth for =A360 off ebay, and if you dont want a phone, pocket PC's go pretty cheap on ebay as well. Just remember you will need an SD card for the maps. TomTom is quite expensive, but again theres some decent deals around.

I have a Garmin StreetPilot 2620 which I chose because of the built-in 4Gb hard drive with a fairly complete detailed map of Europe including some of the accession countries. I had originally thought the 2660 with dead-reckoning would be better but the salesman dissuaded me. (It turns out he was wrong, BTW.)

Based on over a year of experience with it, in the UK, the Alps, the Black Forest, and elsewhere I have decided it is only marginally satisfactory. When it works it is excellent, but when it doesn't work it is perfectly useless (obviously). Gotchas that I wish I'd known about: satellite signals are very weak and just dense cloud or wet overhanging trees will all but block it. (Picture me trying to find my hotel at the end of a network of gravel mountain roads in dense forest in Austria during a thunder storm at midnight with no satellite signal... How happy was I?) A poor antenna only makes the problem worse, and internal antennae are (I have decided) automatically poor antennae. Whatever you get make sure an external antenna is at least an option.

Narrow alleys between buildings (e.g. Spanish and Italian villages), and tunnels (e.g. Switzerland) get no signal at all and no antenna could possibly help. I should have stuck to my preference for a dead-reckoning unit; they are significantly more expensive (about double) but they work when you need a GPS most. My night in the Austrian mountains was perfectly hellish and it needn't have been.

Another thing to consider is that sometimes turns come up faster than the GPS can announce them, especially in small villages, so be sure to get one that displays the route ahead clearly even if it gives spoken instructions. Mine has an irritating feature of zooming in on the next turn just as you approach it, and sometime you don't find out there is another turn immediately following until you've already passed it.

I wish I had known how my unit behaves when you go into an area where its database is out of date. The Garmin just goes nuts. The fix is easy enough: upgrade the database, but a more sane mode of failure would have been good. (It might just display a message to the effect of "off road(?)". The Garmin *does* understand off road driving BTW, and will record your route and then direct you to back-track along it if you want to return, which could be handy in the dessert.)

Be sure to get a removable/portable unit. Once you get used to it, you will want to use it in whatever vehicle you happen to be driving.

Finally, using a GPS is more of a learned skill than you might think. You can't just put your brain in neutral and let it lead you by the nose. You have to stay on top of it. All it takes is a new roundabout; the GPS won't announce it and unless you have a good mental picture of where you are going you will start frantically looking for road signs (maybe not even knowing what to look for) and you will stop concentrating on the traffic just when it should have your undivided attention.

Having said all that, it has made driving into unfamiliar areas much easier, and the ability to say "I feel tired; tell me the phone number of the nearest hotel" is not only convenient, it could be a life saver. It certainly makes long trips more relaxing and enjoyable (when it works) because you don't need to tie yourself to a fixed timetable. I do strongly recommend getting a GPS.

Roy

I use it on a Palm, whichever PDA you use you get the advantage of being able to whip the thing out of your pocket to investigate some routes, e.g. to find out how long it will take you to get somewhere and investigate where to park.

However if you don't use a PDA already then you have the disadvantage of getting one, setting it up and getting it to work in the car (car mount for PDA so you can see it), all this involves extra expense and if you don't habitually carry a PDA around with you then much of the advantage is lost. However if you're handy with filesharing then you can download TomTom for most PDAs for free and test it out before you buy.

For those who don't use a PDA and don't intend to, an all-in-one sucker-mount device like a TomTom Go or the cheaper equivalents available at hellfrauds are probably a better bet and can be taken from car to car, and if there's an audio-out facility, can be used with headphones on a motorbike too.

The TomTom appears to be the most widely-used device and is as a result the best supported, with readily available points-of-interest files downloadable from lots of places.

Hiya

Ive been pissing about with pda's, jackets, bluetooth and the like with tomtom for years.

Just before crimbo, i went out and bought a TomTom One for £220. Best thing i ever did. Neat, Simple, Winner.

Mark.

I use Tom Tom on a Nokia 6630 and a Globalsat Bluetooth.

Very impressed and very portable.

Cheers

Peter

I bought a Garmin Quest about 3 or 4 months ago and to be honest I have a job to fault it. I managed to get it cheap through work but I can tell you that had I known how good it was I wouldn't have hesitatedto pay for it full up price!

I thought that the screen maybe too small but it's not proved to be a problem so far. I bought it becasue it was NOT touch screen and it works with ordnanace survey co-ordinates too. So you can navigate off road and in conjunction with your old OS maps.

Throughly recommended. BTW I have used it in an ordinary car, my day-to-day Range Rover Tdi and and new TD5 90. All fine although you have to be careful to hear the voice directions in a 90, although press a button on the display and "she" will repeat the direction for you. An extremely well though out bit of kit!

Dave

Thanks very much for a comprehensive shakedown of the various systems. My choice would be a self contained unit that I can take from car to car. With your helpful replies it has become very quickly obvious to me that this subject needs more in-depth investigation so I'm off out to the shops to get a hands on look at some of the kit about. Thanks again guys, let you know how it goes.

Dependws on bufget of course but Garmin i3 and TomTom ONE are good models.

I use a pda with gps built in (Medion) which is ok if your comp literate as it can be a bit of a pain sometimes needing re-setting etc. but on the up side I run my memory map s/w on it too which is very useful for plotting greenlanes.

If you want a simple system then you'd be hard pressed to beat Tom Tom navogators.

HTH, Roy.

In message , Cassillis writes

Try lurking here for a wee while

sci.geo.satellite-nav

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