Thread: In Car Nav?

I've got an older Garmin eMap for general GPS duties and it works very well. It's biggest disadantages are that it won't run off 12 V directly, it needs a voltage regulator, its monochrome display is dim at night and hard to read in a car and it's worse during the day. Handheld, it's fine.

I recently bought an older colour iPAQ 1930 with a plug-in GPS card. (that uses the SDIO port) abd running Destinator software.

With the Destinator software one can select an address from ones contact list in the iPAQ and navigate to that address. You can select either North Up or you can keep your direction up (good for women like my wife who cannot navigate her way out a house without a street directory that can be rotated).

The voice and visual prompts are good although sometimes confusing when telling one to turn. You can dim the display for night use.

Oh, Destinator does give lat. and long. in degrees & mins but not UTM which I find far better when using it in conjunction with maps or a street directory (my Garmin eMap is set for UTM).

So far the biggest disadvantages are:

1. The hassle of plugging in the GPS card and waiting for it to get a position lock. Sometimes getting a lock takes ages. I think a later iPAQ with Bluetooth and a Bluetooth GPS card that is always powered and receiving would be far superior. If you forget to take the power lead and only switch the unit on when you get close to your destination, it may not get lock soon enough and you miss the turns you should have taken (been there, done that).
2. Sometimes it will suddenly give a false indication of where it thinks it is and this throws off the instructions wildly. For example, it might have navigated a route which takes you along a freeway where (obviously) there are no U-turns and maybe no exits anywhere nearby. It might be working fine when it will suddenly tell you to do a U-turn or a right or left turn. It now thinks it's on a roadway beside the freeway so it tries to navigate you to an on-ramp to get back onto the freeway. This happens in built-up areas, too. Once that happens you might as well turn it off or it will be squawking useless instructions at you for quite some time. Oh, it is fitted to a mount attached to the windscreen so it is in full view of the sky.

Whatever you buy, the maps need to be updated cheaply,frequently and easily. Destinator uses MapInfo maps and I've already found errors in those. It doesn't even list one very old Sydney suburb and some of the streets around where I work (also an old area) are wrongly named or incorrect.


Ron