Sat navs

almost as bad as the lorry driver spotted going back & forth on the Aberdeen ring road. He was trying to get to Oban and the office, in the English Midlands, hasd said "go to Aberdeen & turn left."

Similar thing here a few years back. Epworth and Hepworth.

Bill

The famous one was St Ives...and St Ives....!

and, ISTR, the tv relay at World's End. This was in london , but I think there'sa another Worlds End a couple of hundred miles away.

They didn't teach map reading in my day either, but it doesn't stop me being pretty good at it. These days I do prefer the satnav though, as once you get down to navigating in a built up area, it's far easier than trying to remember a series of turns, road names, etc. and trying to read (sometimes non-existant) road names while driving. You don't have to find somewhere to stop to look at the detail in your A-Z again to refresh your memory either!

I had a couple of holidays on the Norfolk Broads and the navigation seemed to consist almost enitirely of windmills and pubs as landmarks - the latter being very handy.

SteveW

Not satnav related, but when wanting particular items and searching on the internet for shops that may sell them, it's very hard to find any in the town of "Sale"

SteveW

Exactly.

This is the only time a satnav serves any purpose, if you are driving with someone else. On your own, it's marginally more handy.

TT has always let you do that ... use itineraries.

However a neater way is that I sue Microsoft Autoroute on PC .. very easy to use. I click on start & end points, drop a few 'vias', let it plot route then drag the route to alternate roads if I want (avoid tolls for example) Save the route as a .itn file and then drop it into TT and open it up as itinerary ... route fully planned.

I appreciate your unintended mis-spelling of 'use'.

My company had a driver who trundled off to Brent Cross instead of Brentwood, but later the same year the idiot bimbled his merry way to Cheltenham not Chelmsford.

Are there any sat-navs that let you plot a route before you go ? I'd like one that would show me how it was proposing to get me to a destination before I committed to following it. Can you do that with any of them ? And can you start the plot from somewhere other than the place where you happen to be at that moment ? I'm thinking of buying one, but I'm finding it difficult to find out from the sales blurbs exactly what you can and can't do with them.

Jim Hawkins

------------------------ There are some programs that allow you to plan a route on the PC and download it to the Satnav. TomTom have one of their own (see the link on the tomtom.com website but a better way might be to use Google maps where you can drag the route to alter it and then down load it to your device with programs like Tyre. Others are available if you Google "tomtom intinerary converter". I haven't used then myself but I believe they are fairly easy to use. Google maps also allows you to view parts of the route in Streetview if you want to see what it looks like.

John M

I doubt if he could pass a current driving test if he couldn't read for whatever reason.

In message , snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes

I do have a sat nav, but often as not now I will use the Google Maps Navigation function on my Android smartphone for a bit of quick and dirty navigation. Just cos it's handier really for a quick bit of navigation. It's gets a sat lock pretty much instantly (presumably cos it knows pretty much where it is from the cell towers), the google map search is much quicker and easier than inputting on the satnav. And it does have an attempt to show which bits of the route have got traffic delays (I know that some new satnavs can do this sort of thing as well)

The main limitation is that you can't use way points or get it to give alternate routes (unlike the desktop googlemaps). and of course you need a 3G connection. Though it seems to do some pre caching of maps, as even when it loses 3G for a bit it still seems to show the maps fine.

I know someone who failed his theory test as he could not find the exam centre:-)

It wasn't that he couldn't read - he didn't listen. The POD form would be handed to him with the address on it, but he'd already been told where the pickup/deliver was and instead of checking the written version, would head off into the sunset...

I used mine for the first time yesterday on a route I take frequently

- 40 miles in which it didn't put a foot wrong, including the alternate route I knew was shortest, and when I deviated for a spot of camera work it nagged me about a wrong turn then after a km started giving me new directions via the road I was now on. One sticky moment came when I stopped in a town along the way; having parked up next to a pub, on a dead end road next to sheltered housing, it insisted I could rejoin the route by driving through a pensioner's living room. I'm mildly impressed and might use it again, but it works quite well, although basic. I still prefer maps though - a decent map provides a much better overview.

That's our scenario, except for the pensioner bit. The TomTom-following lorry drivers try to make a turn which they can't, and end up with their front bumper where our fence post was until they got there. The living room is a foot further. Someday, we're going to be looking at a headlight instead of our TV set. The house has been here for hundreds of years, we're not moving it!

-- Davey.

'Reading' and 'Comprehension' are different subjects. I won a German Reading Prize at school, but I didn't know what the words meant, that wasn't the point. I was able to read a piece of previously-unseen prose correctly.

You need an RSJ for a fence post. Or maybe an anti tank ditch.