Satnav - TomTom vs Garmin

[Dave Liquorice]

TMC but I don't know the data source. Is the old Traffic Master system still up and running, I think the green (or were they dark blue) cameras are still about?

As for directions I think that's mainly down to how the road network is broken up into sections that are the flagged with a delay/stationary. These sections of road are just delimited with a node at each end with other sections sharing the same node. So for example a road joins a roundabout, that node has that road and the two adjacent segments of roundabout. If the road is flagged as blocked that appears in the node on the roundabout. The routing alogrythm sees that and won't route traffic past it, even traffic that is just going round the roundabout...

[JohnP]

Harry Bloomfield, Esq. [e-mail]> wrote in news:rl1knu$iu$ [e-mail]:

Spot on - I do this before going on holiday to foreign places. (did)

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

on 30/09/2020, charles supposed :

RDS? A data signal hidden in the normal broadcast FM signal. It works well for long term issues like road works, but less good for immediate problems, due to long delays in processing hold ups.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Dave Liquorice formulated on Wednesday :

I have the built in the dash TMC system, it announces itself at switch on, but has not worked for several years. When it did work, it would sound a tone and flash up a waiting traffic symbol on the dash display.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I have fount tomtom GO on my android to be excellent at adapting to whatever route I choose.

And thee great thing about on a mobile, is that it gets updated to the latest all the time, and can talk home to get latest traffic and speed camera info.

If I wanted a dedicated unit, I would still by a cheap smartphone and use it with just 'Go' on it

[The Natural Philosopher]

It would depend on the car. Actually I have no trouble at all with smartphone audio. 'Jane' is nicely high enough frequency to not get obliterated by the rumbles and boinks of suspension

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, not always. It entirely depends on the car. Mine only couples for phone calls, for example,

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well the updates can come in over wifi/home broadband. You dont NEED mobile internet for tom tom go to work, it just nets you more live information.

Its not a cloud service as such, its a local app that has a pipeline home to gather traffic and speed camera info.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Exactly. I downloaded 'Northern Europe' for free on tom tom go. Its £60 per year which is less than the cost of one speeding fine

Worth every penny

[Roger Hayter]

My TomTom does online traffic updates. I don't know the quality compared to other providers.

[AnthonyL]

Indeed. I loved my Garmin and whenever I had the opportunity to compare it against Tom Tom it seemed better and easier to use. However it reached its "sell by date" in as much as it would no longer accept new maps and clearly was struggling with memory with its existing maps.

At that stage I resolved never to buy a dedicated unit again and started using:

1) Here! maps 2) Google maps

on my smartphone.

Here! is primarily off-line but google maps can be downloaded and I have 50mile squares to the compass points around my location. So the only data I use is for traffic or for the occasional time I go outside my Google maps and have forgotten to download that portion.

Having a 128Gb SD card in my phone is handy though for all this plus music, photos etc.

No more concerns about maps being out of date, though of course the smartphone will be every few years or so anyway.

Oh, and I always have a recent <5 yrs old paper map handy in the seat pocket. My granddaughters think they are just pretty pictures though the elder one, who has had to do a lot of work travel in the past year or two now appreciates she can have an overall view of where she is in the country.

[Adrian Caspersz]

Recycle something on the way to being thrown out?

I've an old 2008 Garmin 255W that still works, the battery is still good, but the original maps were 12 years out of date and I'd never updated them.

So had a look around for newer maps, and was determined not to install stolen assets, as seems everyone does when looking at how much Garmin charges for them.

So found another map source, OpenStreetMap.

It works just as well as the original for me :)

-&-

You can download a free codepoint database from Ordinance Survey

Been a bit busy to try it though.

These things are less than £20 on ebay, and work well.

[AnthonyL]

My old Garmin would automatically re-route based on RDS data. Unfortunately it seemed it would only get the signal 1 mile after the last motorway turn-off.

[Vir Campestris]

Bet they bought the wrong product.

Tomtom do truck satnavs

that you can tell how big your vehicle is - but they cost more than the car ones.

Andy

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Martin Brown used his keyboard to write :

The only reason I use my built in, is because it has a much larger display than my phone, easier to see at a glance, with more details on screen, such as - the next two turns, type of turn, roundabout layout, time to arrive, time to run, distance etc..

[Tim Streater]

Ifyou can be arsed. Our best navigator is SWMBO anyway, so we didn't have any SatNav for 10 years. Then a new car and built-in SatNav. It's useful for navigating in cities but for anywhere new we tend to do a bit of AA route-mapping ahead of time. The audio is much better, too, in both cases.

And I don't want a "better smart phone". If truth be told, I don't want *any* f****ng smart phone, although SWMBO points out that they are better for texting than my preferred old clamshell. I suppose also it's useful to see the bits of flood video my nephew posts from Japan on the family WhatsApp Group.

[T i m]

Oh I'm sure. They were all generally just std looking ones.

Yeah, as do Garmin as the AA truck we were brought back 175 miles in had one. It was interesting to run my Garmin beside his and watch them both working synchronise. ;-)

I have yet to have any Garmin GPS send me down unsuitable roads and whilst the early ones had 'different' transport settings (Pedestrian / car / truck etc), which I used, I don't think the my latest one is quite so flexible (but I may have just not looked for those settings as I generally only use it in the car).

Cheers, T i m

[Martin Brown]

Do you sometimes look at the road ahead as well?

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Tim Streater brought next idea :

I got satnav, before there were any satnav. I imported a receiver which simply outputted Lat and Long, integrated it to a laptop via a serial port and mixed in some software.

I have yet to find a female who could operate a paper map :-)

[Tim Streater]

Bad luck. She also fixed the bathroom taps when we moved in here.