In message , Roger Chapman
writes
On 08/11/2010 12:55, chris French wrote:

snip

Garmin was helpful and competent.

I have likewise had excellent help from Garmin for a hand held GPS.
For that reason (and the fact that the Garmin was the only equipment
to take grid references) I bought a Garmin sat-nav for my car.
Unfortunately the route finding abilities of the Garmin left much to
be desired - the basic problem being that it was wildly over
optimistic (by a factor of two or more) about what was possible on
single track roads leading to endless 'short cuts' that took
considerably longer than sticking to classified roads would have. The
timing of the directions also left much to be desired.


I don't know if fancier ones allow it, but some way of tweaking the the
way it chooses the roads would be useful. And a way to learn over time
how long you take over certain types of roads.

Both the Garmin and the TomTom allow you to chose fastest or shortest
and I think to avoid Motorways but Garmin's shortcoming is the values
it gives to individual lengths of road. Fastest can't be worked out
without having both time and distance in the equation.

Oh sure, ours does that sort of thing. I was thinking of some way to
tell it to give greater weight to choosing a route that say uses more
major roads over side roads.

I suppose what I mean is some sort of 'sensible route' function. Like
the way as a human you might look at a shorter, but wiggly route and say
nah, it's easier and hardly any longer to go on some more major roads.

Ours seems to choose a wiggly route even if it might theoretically save
you just 30 seconds or something I reckon.


I eventually junked the Garmin and bought a TomTom which is much
better in almost every aspect. However it, like the Garmin before it,
has thousands of junctions coded with the wrong priority and also one
or very odd quirks such as advising keeping right to avoid driving
into a bog standard roadside lay-by on the A66.

Ditto, doesn't all the mapping for these things come from a couple of
companies (Navteq and someone else?), so I guess the same problems will
occur with multiple manufacturers.

Probably. It is a feature I find irritating rather than misleading
under most circumstances

Indeed, mostly irritating, occasionally confusing,.


but again Garmin falls short of TomTom in not displaying as many minor
side roads along the way and sometimes even a prolonged look at the
display (not to be recommended while moving) leaves the next turn
uncertain.

Yup, that could be annoying, Ours seem to show pretty much every road,
no matter how small.
--
Chris French