Replaced Nav V with Phone App

spm0912 said:

The problem doing this is there are different algorithms used by the mapping companies, so whilst you may have thought you had planned to ride on road A, Garmin may think road B is faster so will route you down the one it likes. This is especially true if you have no motorways set in my route app but you haven't checked the no motorways avoidance box on your Nav. To some extend you can avoid this by having more waypoints but as has been mentioned there is a limit to the amount you can have.

I have been fascinated with maps since I was a kid and one of the best parts of my trips is planning the route. I treat the Sat Nav as a dumb device (the Garmin is dumber than most!!) and it's there merely to guide me on the route I want to take. I could do it with a map only but 300 miles of back roads gets tiresome if you have to keep looking at it and frustrating if you're leading other bikes which I frequently do. Most of the problems people have with satnavs is they expect it to do too much, it's merely an aid to navigation. Back to the OP this is why A stand alone sat nav beats a phone (at the moment) Set it on 2D North up and on a GS with a whizz wheel you can zoom l in and out on the fly, know where you are at any given time, make route adjustments without having to alter your planned routing and all without stopping or removing gloves. Yes it takes practice, so get out and ride more!!

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Well I'm on 9000+ miles on the new GS I bought in March 2017, so I don't think lack of riding time and practice in using satnavs is the issue! If anything just the reverse, the more you use them the more their deficiencies irritate, and as for zooming in and out and making route adjustments without stopping, whizz wheel or not, this sounds dangerously distracting to me, and possibly enough to get you arrested in some countries.

Even when stopped, having been there and done that, I found zooming in and out to work out an alternative when you need to make a change of route, incredibly frustrating. On one occasion I ended up in a 20 mile tailback to get through the St Bernard tunnel and wanted to work out which way to go to get back to a point where I could take an alternative route out of Switzerland. The problem is that with small screens with limited resolution you have to zoom right in to see names of nearby roads and towns, but then when you zoom out to see the bigger picture of where you are heading, most of that information disappears, making it very hard to put your position into context. Very laborious to plot a route that way - in sheer frustration I eventually phoned my son and got him to find me a route on Google maps on his PC and give me a list of key towns to head for.

With my current system I could simply go for a coffee break and while stopped plot a new route, or make a new version of the existing one in the MyRoute routing module, and immediately load it into the satnav app on the phone - this would probably take about 5 minutes, and I would then be good to go. On the recent tour of Andalusia I have just completed, I left the Garmin at home and used the MyRoute Navigation and routing app. Every time we wanted to move on I just booked the next hotel on booking.com and then created a route taking in the roads and places I wanted to visit en-route. Very quick and easy, and immediately available to load into the satnav app.

Fred

ChazzyB said:

I'll frequently bust the 29 waypoint limit the Nav V has with a planned route, done in Tyre. Auto recalculate is switched on so they recalculate when I import the GPX files into the trip planner. A route will also recalculate when you go off the planned route. Like for the new one way system in a French town I found on Thursday.

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I have learnt through bitter experience to never put a waypoint within a town I am passing through, as that is when you are most likely to take a wrong turn or find things like new one way streets, and can end up going round in circles as the satnav tries desperately to get you to the waypoint you have either missed or can no longer get to. When the town in question is full of narrow cobbled streets, with stop signs on steep inclines or right angle turns, then it can all become a bit of a nightmare, especially in the wet.

What I do now is put a waypoint well before the town, and one well after on the road I want to use. This leaves me free to get lost or find somewhere to eat or a petrol station without getting into conflict with the Nav, which will just keep recalculating to find the way out of town to the next waypoint. If in the process it wants me to turn down a narrow cobbled alley or other unsuitable road as a short cut I just ignore it and keep to the main roads, guided by any road signs, and eventually will get put back on track.

Very interesting topic.

Anyone tried the app Scenic by Moto Mappers? Been playing with it since last night. Seems to have all the right features for basic navigation including the option for curvy routes.

Negan said:

Very interesting topic.

Anyone tried the app Scenic by Moto Mappers? Been playing with it since last night. Seems to have all the right features for basic navigation including the option for curvy routes.

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I think I looked into this before, but dismissed it because it is iPhone only. I also didn't really like the complicated credits based way you buy maps, etc, and seemed like it could get expensive. However, from the video on their website it looks like it works well, and has some features like autorouting of curvy routes that MyRoute doesn't have. Apparently it is planned for a future release, though I don't see myself using that much if at all. It seems like the developers are based in the Netherlands, and I think the MyRoute developers are also Dutch, so I wonder what is it with the Netherlands that makes it a hotbed of satnav app development?

fred_jb said:

I think I looked into this before, but dismissed it because it is iPhone only. I also didn't really like the complicated credits based way you buy maps, etc, and seemed like it could get expensive. However, from the video on their website it looks like it works well, and has some features like autorouting of curvy routes that MyRoute doesn't have. Apparently it is planned for a future release, though I don't see myself using that much if at all. It seems like the developers are based in the Netherlands, and I think the MyRoute developers are also Dutch, so I wonder what is it with the Netherlands that makes it a hotbed of satnav app development?

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Interesting observation, TomTom also being dutch.

Will see hoe Scenic works and report back. I normally prefer classic GPS with full route planning ability but since the Zumo 660, nothing really got me excited.

Might look at latest Rider from TomTom.

Negan said:

Interesting observation, TomTom also being dutch.

Will see hoe Scenic works and report back. I normally prefer classic GPS with full route planning ability but since the Zumo 660, nothing really got me excited.

Might look at latest Rider from TomTom.

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The latest TomTom 500 series looks interesting. I had a 400 which I quite liked and which was reasonably easy to use, and unlike the TomTom car models was able to support loading of pre-planned routes which for me is a minimum requirement of a bike satnav. I've also had the TomTom app, and I'm not sure if this has changed, but at the time there was no sensible way to load pre-planned routes. I think there was a workaround on IOS, but for Android you needed a rooted phone to put the route files in the right folder, and it was all very inconvenient, so a bit of a non-starter for bike use, though fine in the car if just going from A to B.

My old Nav 5 has proved the most reliable out of all the ways I have navigated. It's a bit clunky and slow (like me) but has never let me down as a device. I always take it with me when I go touring, although my preferred method is MRA running on a phone.