OT: 1971 Satnav

[ARW]

I have worked out how I managed to get through Eastern Europe in the 90's.

It was called a map book.

[T i m]

<snip>

Me three, and having the ability to take the most likely turnoff at the roundabout that has the exit you 'planned' blocked off and to have the 'map' fix itself and pickup where you were heading is priceless. ;-)

That's not to say we didn't cope of course, but I wonder how much time and fuel was wasted? ;-(

OOI, I set mine to be 'North Up' because 1) I can read a map and 2) because it's still handy to know roughly what way you are heading,

*if* you do need to fill in briefly for the GPS at something a bit unusual.

It's really nice to be able to enter a postcode as you are about to setoff and have it provide you the best route and ETA a few seconds later.

If I'm going somewhere I've not been before I'll still like to get a feel for it on the PC / Google maps but still rely on the (Garmin) GPS to get me there. It (they) hasn't really failed yet and I've been using them since 1997. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Andy Bennet]

The Intel 1602 Bipolar PROM (256 * 8 bits) was released in 1970. The Intel 1702 2k bit EPROM was introduced in September1971, shortly followed in November 1971 by the first microprocessor, the 4 bit Intel 4004.

Interestingly both AMD and Intel were heavily into memory devices in the early 70's, both to experiment with the process improvements required in order to produce future complex microprocessors.

[Andy Bennet]

I find using Postcodes too vague sometimes for locating my destination in an area I am not familiar. Here's a handy Google map tip for precise location if you don't already know. Locate the precise destination with your mouse pointer and right click. Select "What's here?" from the opened window and a new box opens up with the accurate lat/long. Bung that in yer satnav and you're good to go!

[NY]

Especially when the coordinates that the postcode brings up are completely wrong. In the Royal Mail postcode database, our postcode is located within a few hundred yards of our house on the same road as us, but Google Maps places its marker about half a mile away, on a completely different road which is about a mile away by road (unless you go through people's gardens and wade through a stream to take the straight line!). Evidently they are not using the info from the RM postcode database.

I didn't know about the "What's Here" feature of Google Maps. It's useful. However lat/long has the disadvantages that a) it requires more characters to specify (admittedly to a greater degree of precision), and b) the format may not always be accepted (some satnavs and online sites want DD.MMMMM°, some want DD° MM.MMMM', some want DD° MM' SS" and some want an N/S or E/W prefix (for north/south/east/west) while others want a minus sign to indicate south of the equator or west of Greenwich.

[T i m]

<snip>

Yeah. They seem to range from one building to a road a few miles long!

Cool.

I used to use Lat/Long much more on the more basic Garmins and believe it allowed you to see such if you created a 'Man Overboard' etc. You could also enter in a Lat/Long if you were setting a new waypoint.

Good tip though and I'll give it a try, if it looks like there is any discrepancy.

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Are any houses on that road also covered by your postcode?

A mates business didn't come up properly and we reported the error to them and they corrected it.

Again, I've updated a Google Maps reference where they stated a local Park car park was in the wrong place and removed it.

Agreed. I've not tried to enter / read such on a GPS for a while but I remember having to do conversions in the past (I think either an early Garmin or it's PC software (Mapsource) allowing you to change the format.

What might be handy if you had access to and could input location date using 'what3words' format ...

Probably much easier to remember or relay to someone else (like the emergency services, assume they also have routine access to it).

Cheers, T i m

[John J Armstrong]

Yes, I remember them well. Happy days. In the 60s, father driving, mother "navigating" with the AA route. Younger sister and I in the back. One year we went to deepest rural Devon - a long way, in those pre-motorway days, from Edinburgh. We got lost, and evening was drawing on. We passed a sign that said "Charrington". Mum, "Stop! Let me see where Charrington is on the map." Me, wearily, from the back, "Mum, Charrington is the brand of beer they sell in that pub we just passed".

[nightjar]

IIRC the criteria was that one postcode received at least 20 letters a day. As you say, that can be a single building or an area.

[nightjar]

My route would have been created from a map and I would have the map with me as a backup. At worst, I would need to stop long enough to find a new route to get back onto my planned route.

[polygonum_on_google]

And some postcodes are very odd. "Odd shaped" and "Non-Contiguous" here:

[NY]

I didn't know that was the criterion used for determining how many properties were covered by a single postcode. I know that office blocks often have one postcode per business or building.

In my case, the location that Google returns for the postcode is still the same postcode (by doing a reverse lookup on streetmap.co.uk - what's the postcode of the point I've clicked on) but the coordinates in the Royal Mail "Codepoint" postcode file are different by several hundred metres as the crow flies and about 1 km by the nearest road/foot route. Streetmap maps the postcode to the coordinates in the database, Google chooses somewhere else that's still within the "circle of confusion".

[charles]

Some even have 2 in one building.

[ARW]

I set something up the other day on line and I used the gf's postcode.

It seems all 60 houses on that street have the same postcode. Going on the bit where you enter the postcode and then have to scroll down to choose a house number. Just double checked it with Royal Mails post code finder.

[Max Demian]

Sometimes two blocks of flats have the same postcode, leading to confusion between flats with the same number in both blocks.

[whisky-dave]

Why is that difficult to understand teh reason behind that.

I get that too in fact all the odd number of houses are one postcode and all the even are another postcode.

Seems logical to me.

[tim...]

the final scene suggest you might be right

[Andy Burns]

"Originally broadcast 15 October 1971"

[Dave Plowman (News)]

My brother's house has it's own post code. It's an old house now surrounded by modern estates.

[Steve Walker]

My, now somewhat aging, Garmin Nuvi is switchable between the various forms of input. I have never needed to use Lat/Long with it in the UK, only in the Republic of Ireland.

SteveW