"Cassillis" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
news:
[email protected]...
> Hi group and a Happy New Year to All.
> I know some of the group use these systems. I have some money from Santa
to
> play with and quite fancy one.
> I can lay my hands on a Garmin Street Pilot i3 GPS for what sounds a very
> reasonable £149.
> Does anyone have knowledge of this system?
> Any other recommendations?
> It will be going into my Defender 90 if this makes a difference
I have a Garmin StreetPilot 2620 which I chose because of the built-in 4Gb
hard drive with a fairly complete detailed map of Europe including some of
the accession countries. I had originally thought the 2660 with
dead-reckoning would be better but the salesman dissuaded me. (It turns out
he was wrong, BTW.)
Based on over a year of experience with it, in the UK, the Alps, the Black
Forest, and elsewhere I have decided it is only marginally satisfactory.
When it works it is excellent, but when it doesn't work it is perfectly
useless (obviously). Gotchas that I wish I'd known about: satellite signals
are very weak and just dense cloud or wet overhanging trees will all but
block it. (Picture me trying to find my hotel at the end of a network of
gravel mountain roads in dense forest in Austria during a thunder storm at
midnight with no satellite signal... How happy was I?) A poor antenna only
makes the problem worse, and internal antennae are (I have decided)
automatically poor antennae. Whatever you get make sure an external antenna
is at least an option.
Narrow alleys between buildings (e.g. Spanish and Italian villages), and
tunnels (e.g. Switzerland) get no signal at all and no antenna could
possibly help. I should have stuck to my preference for a dead-reckoning
unit; they are significantly more expensive (about double) but they work
when you need a GPS most. My night in the Austrian mountains was perfectly
hellish and it needn't have been.
Another thing to consider is that sometimes turns come up faster than the
GPS can announce them, especially in small villages, so be sure to get one
that displays the route ahead clearly even if it gives spoken instructions.
Mine has an irritating feature of zooming in on the next turn just as you
approach it, and sometime you don't find out there is another turn
immediately following until you've already passed it.
I wish I had known how my unit behaves when you go into an area where its
database is out of date. The Garmin just goes nuts. The fix is easy
enough: upgrade the database, but a more sane mode of failure would have
been good. (It might just display a message to the effect of "off road(?)".
The Garmin *does* understand off road driving BTW, and will record your
route and then direct you to back-track along it if you want to return,
which could be handy in the dessert.)
Be sure to get a removable/portable unit. Once you get used to it, you will
want to use it in whatever vehicle you happen to be driving.
Finally, using a GPS is more of a learned skill than you might think. You
can't just put your brain in neutral and let it lead you by the nose. You
have to stay on top of it. All it takes is a new roundabout; the GPS won't
announce it and unless you have a good mental picture of where you are going
you will start frantically looking for road signs (maybe not even knowing
what to look for) and you will stop concentrating on the traffic just when
it should have your undivided attention.
Having said all that, it has made driving into unfamiliar areas much easier,
and the ability to say "I feel tired; tell me the phone number of the
nearest hotel" is not only convenient, it could be a life saver. It
certainly makes long trips more relaxing and enjoyable (when it works)
because you don't need to tie yourself to a fixed timetable. I do strongly
recommend getting a GPS.
Roy
