Satnav recommendations?

If he gets a sat nav instead, then his wife will have nothing to do but pick holes in his driving or nag him about the decorating for the whole trip, I'm not sure he's thunk this through!

Reply to
Ian Rawlings
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Heh. When I first got the Tomtom, Di spent the first few journeys arguing with "Jane", as we called her. "Nah, she's wrong, we don't want to be going down here, that's rubbish" and so on. After a few trips, she shut up, as "Jane" was almost infallible. However, Jane *once* took us on a silly detour down country lanes in France, when all was needed was a simple left turn on a major road. The fact that Di is still crowing about this, and telling anyone who will listen that satnavs can make mistakes, says a lot about how good they really are. (When they ****ing well work, that is.)

Reply to
Rich B

I've found a few problem areas, for example there's a junction coming out of Bristol along the A37 that my tomotom insists I can't cross so tries to detour me through tiny residential roads, when I can in fact just go straight through the junction. Bristol has recently had some major roadworks that have affected the routes badly though so certain areas of Bristol are just plain fooked now for satnav. It's the first bit of complicated roads you get to after coming off the M32 as well so there'll be a lot of confused sat navvers entering Bristol!

I can remember my first satnav experience with the first generation Garmin Streetpilot which cost about £1,000 at the time IIRC. I hadn't decided on whether to take the Landy or the Lotus (way back when it was still in one piece) but picked the Landy, the satnav ended up taking me through every flooded tiny farm track in the whole of Berkshire during one of those periods when excessive rain was causing trouble. Branches down, foot-deep wades, tiny lanes, tight corners, pot-holed roads, everything bar actual green lanes! The proper route was via well-maintained major roads, no idea why it took me cross country. Glad it wasn't my sat nav!

Reply to
Ian Rawlings

That explains a lot - like why I always get lost crossing Bristol. :-)

I did a similar thing, when I'd had the Tomtom about a month. We were coming back from Okehampton via a village south of Bath, and set Jane to take us the "shortest" route. Wow. I saw bits of Devon I never knew existed, farmyards, fords, tiny bridges, almost-green lanes, a llama herd, a village with the same name as I use on a lot of web forums (cue lots of silly photos), and a lot of surprised farmers coming the other way. It took forever to get to our destination, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Reply to
Rich B

I use the "shortest route" or "avoid motorways" quite a bit, or at least check my route and make sure it misses out great big stretches of the A303 or similar. In the pinzgauer I set it to "max speed

50mph", that also gives me lots of interesting drives. Mind you around here the only big boring road is the A303, just about every other road in my vicinity snakes through interesting little villages or through countryside and farmland. Many of the routes I plot seem to keep taking me up the very steep, very twisty "zig zag hill" near Shaftesbury, that's a bit of a pig in the pinz;

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Reply to
Ian Rawlings

I've used a top of the range TomTOm in Sweden and Germany and find them to be very good - I don't mind the lack of lane information because the direction info is given far enough before the turn to enable me to work out what to do, something that my organic guidance system can't seem to master (or should it be mistress?)

The reason that I have not bought a TomTom is the lack of a suitable unit for the bike.

Richard ;-)

Reply to
Richard

She already does the driving comment bit, being a qualified (LAS trained) ambulance driver in her spare time. But that's fine cos I comemnt on her driving. ;-)

R
Reply to
Richard

So when she's doing the directing, does it get hairy at the traffic lights...

Reply to
Ian Rawlings

Not _yet_ ;-)

Richard

Reply to
Richard

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