Re: GPS recomendations please
 

Only if you have an iphone

Re: GPS recomendations please
 

I think it comes on android too

Re: GPS recomendations please
 

I have a variety of phones with various apps plus I have a Garmin. And I don't personally think any of them give particularly good directions. :lol:

I always have a laugh when I drive down Hwy 2 or 3 for example and I see people turn off who are clearly following their stupid GPS directions. Endlessly my Garmin tries to send me up or down Cowboy Trail, which makes no sense, or say, Hwy 519 to get to Lethbridge.

And then it gets really upset with me and keeps telling me to do U-turns - even when there is no left turn there.

Still think you can't beat looking at a map, maps.google.com

And imx GPS sets all crap out as soon as you get around high-rise buildings.

Really all I use my GPS for is to get a rough idea of ETA, and it measures speed more accurately than a speedometer.

Re: GPS recomendations please
 

iPhone/android & google maps. Works for me, in a pinch.

Not that any of you will ever need this, but GPS is mostly hopeless (& can be downright dangerous) in rural Qc/Maine/NB/ON.

Neither GPS nor phone mapping apps are any use whatsoever for getting into/out of Montreal Airport (variously known as YUL/PET/Dorval) during ongoing roadworks.

I tend to still rely on hard-copy map reading. /old codger.

Re: GPS recomendations please
 

LOL, this made me laugh, and reminded me of a recent experience.

My in-laws are big paper maps people. Love their paper maps and don't trust technology and maps. Which is fine, they know their way around really well and can give us great directions.

About a year and a half ago, my MIL was driving me to Heathrow. She'd been a zillion times, but never to T5. So she pulled out her paper map, which had to be at LEAST 30 years old... and was printed before T5 was built. She was trying to use that to navigate... and then as we got close to the airport, insisted on following the map instead of the signs pointing her to the airport. I kept suggesting I just put my GPS on to help get her into the terminal as she was panicking and swearing and trying to work out how to get into the terminal while trying to get me to read her decades-old map that was clearly out of date... eventually she just pulled over, and I said forget it, I'm putting my GPS on, having a look at the route it's taking us it looks to be about right, clearly it's bringing us into the departures section so between that and signposting we should be just fine, let's maybe not follow the map that doesn't even have where we are trying to go on it!!!

My in-laws are great, I love them to bits, but that experience completely cracked me up. I've also never heard my MIL drop so many f-bombs in such a short period of time. She was incredibly embarrassed afterwards, and my husband had a good laugh when I relayed the story. :)

Re: GPS recomendations please
 

LOL indeed, Schnooks ;)

My sister & I still argue about which of the 1966 & '69 AA road books are better/worse for UK driving/navigation. Leeds & London are particular trouble spots ;)!!! It would help if Dsis could actually read a map, whether hard copy or on a screen :(.

(We solved the Heathrow problem by no one ever, ever, EVER driving there again! Now if only I could sort YUL...)

Re: GPS recomendations please
 

The US, since the Clinton administration switched off the military Selective Availability system in 2000, has guaranteed free access to GPS constellations - so much so that new satellites built since 2007 do not support the feature at all. Other regional constellations include GLONASS, the Chinese BeiDou, India's IRNSS, Japan's QZSS (strictly, an augmentation to GPS, not a separate system), as well as the European Galileo system: commercial satnav devices will gradually support more and more of these, I suspect.

But, as you say, the navigation aids are only as good as the base maps the satellite data links to. TeleAtlas and NavTeq are much of a muchness, really, though Navteq's mapping tends to be rated more highly by users for accuracy.

Modern survey instruments, by the way, don't normally use the "raw" signal at all, except as an aid to acquisition of the satellite constellation. A survey instrument looks at phase shifts and timing markers in the carrier wave of the GPS signal to generate a very precise position, typically with corrections for atmospheric and orbital errors calculated from a local base station. There are various complex filters and error-correction algorithms embedded in the instrument, resulting in real-time position usually available to a couple of millimeters of accuracy for latitude and longitude, and a centimeter or two for elevation. That would make a geo-caching challenge fairly trivial!

/work intruding on BE conversation

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