sat nav

[rich.]

Buy a road atlas

What's one of those then?

i have trouble reading them at 80mph..

[rich.]

took sat nav to an ex bbc engineer & he had it fixed in half an hour...

[rich.]

bought a new tomtom apparently its free updates for life....

i dont believe it either......

[Mitsuru]

I have sat nav on my phone, but onl use it when the bit of paper
I have the directions written on gets blown out the window!

It took me 3 years of constantly emailing google maps supplier and
tomtom etc to change the details they had for my area. The street I
live in is a dead end street one way in same way out.

Because someone looking at an old map(pre 1940's) seen that there
was a foot pat between my street and the next one, which has long
since been part of someones house and garden.

That next street is pedestrian only too, and there are signs every
where, but do they look at them, no they listen ad do what their
prat nav tells them!

Add to which as I live at the bottom the street and with various
family members coming and going the drive gates get left open
frequently. I have had delivery trucks and cars pull onto the drive
blasting their horns epecting me to let them through when the is a
car parked there.

When there isn't anything parked on the drive but when I have
been fortunately there to stop them,It was two idiots who claimed
to be from the ramblers association. Even after telling them that the
family garden was not a footpath, they said I was new to the area.

My response was, No you must be as my family have owned this
house and land since the 50's and we have documents since the
house was built in the 20's there is no foot path or through road and
well F off, I then and called the police!

Never believe what those things tell you, and if do everything it tells
you when basic common sense tells you not too, I will expect to see
you on the local or national news, or youtube!

Sorry prat navs get my heckles up,

[rich.]

ooh a raw nerve!! i use mine regularly & when i was a taxi driver all the time, in the uk the satnav postcode system is brilliant but over here the post code covers the commune & it doesnt work. i was taking a mute handicaped child home & that was a nightmare, when i finally found the house i asked her mother how long the estate had been built & she replied only 25 years...the machine was showing streets etc but no names...

[suffolkpete]

in the uk the satnav postcode system is brilliant

Not always. If you enter my post code, it directs you to a similar address in the next village a mile and a half away. The consequence of this is that I constantly have goods mis-delivered and it is driving the lady in the "other" house to distraction, particularly if it is the sort of courier who chucks goods over the fence and then runs for it . Even if the error is corrected, things aren't going to change until the couriers update their satnavs.

[rich.]

theres always one

[JPB]

Two as it happens in this case! My address is the same as one in Widdrington, the next village to the West. The first five characters of the post codes are the same, meaning that I can empathise totally with what Pete said. The satnav apps on my phone (Google maps and World) both use complete postcodes, so if everyone ran google maps on their device, there'd be no problem but it has become apparent that Yodel, Citylink and Interparcel (to name but three of the worst offenders) use satnav software that only gives the first cluster and the number from the second, so when they're faced with two addresses that their satnavs tell them are one and the same, what else can they do but fecker it up?

The labels that these agencies and parcel services use only have the post town and postcode on, both villages are under the same post town so such blunders are inevitable and I've come to know the very nice young woman - who lives at the other address - quite well.

[Richard Moss]

The answer, of course, is to combine your assets and use whatever is necessary. We get our trainee pilots to plan using paper resources but navigate (primarily) electronically, following along with the paper as fallback for when the fuse blows!

For road use:

Road atlas: dirt cheap, gives a superb "big picture" and is great for planning routes because of the size of the page (the big paper "screen"). Works very well for the longer stages of the route when a satnav is a bit pointless (I can work out how to get from London to Edinburgh without relying upon a TomTom or Garmin). easy to update (pocket money prices)

Satnav: not too expensive, good for dynamic updates of routes when you miss a turn or have to take a diversion. Excellent for the later stages of the journey, especially in unfamiliar surroundings.

Smartphones: Suitable for use as a backup to the satnav but relies upon network coverage and (potentially) costs the earth to use abroad.

As for which satnav - I used TomTom for years and was reasonably happy with it. When I came out to the middle east I updated my wife's TomTom with the latest maps (bought from the manufacturers own website) and then found that their maps for this region are dreadful. Huge areas of cities and towns not covered - so we bought a couple of cheap Garmin Nuvis. There was an initial period of adjustment but overall I think that its user interface (menus and controls) is a little better than TomTom but its maps are infinitely better. For me it would be Garmin everytime now, just for the better information that it gives.

[JPB]

Smartphones: Suitable for use as a backup to the satnav but relies upon network coverage and (potentially) costs the earth to use abroad.

Put simply; no. Only Google maps uses the network, and then only if you use the photographic streetview option rather than the plain, drawn maps that are small and can be stored easily on the phone's SD card or equivalent ext4 partition. But World - or other software of its type - is precisely the same as using any other software and has no need of a network connection, using only the GPS receiver to provide a service that's much like the Garmin or the TomTom of this world, but without a software limit or indeed a cost. With either native Google or World, you can still use the voices from third party TTS engines, if that's your thing, so could have the full BA Baracus or Frank Zappa experience to guide you the wrong way down someone's drive when you really ought not to have jibbed at the motorway in the first place....