Navman PINs

Does the navman have a screen indicating satelittes & signal strengths? Perhaps you should compare these two screens from each GPS & see what results you get.

The Navmans seem to be only good in cities... Mine gets terribly confused on main highways. Yes there seems to be some map reading problems the Navman dosent seem to know if its an intersection or an overpass and has directed me to "turn right now" where no road exists, or "do legal U turn"... on a freeway...
I'm just not sure if the problem is the data the thing has to work with or the inability to interpret the data it's given.. Navman support told me when i pointed out some shortcomings that i should have made sure it was suitable for the use I intended....hmmmmmmm I wonder why I did buy it....to navigate around town I thought....must be wrong... must have bought it as a conversation piece. I can't find a way of teaching it to learn from past mistakes....

what version do you have 1, 2 or 3, we have 3 and don't have this problem, i would recommend you ring the guys at Superalarm at Redfern or go there they were very helpfull to us.

Baz.

Jason,

You have to understand how it works.
The Navman PIN is a windows CE 2003 pocket PC, it has an incorporated GPS which talks to any GPS software via com2.
I got one and using the cr@ppy smartST software that comes with it I had the same problem, this is due to the fact that the GPS itself gets a fix (I used third party software to diagnose/troubleshoot that) but smartst drops the almanac if it doesn't get a fix within xx number of seconds, then it has to do it all again (cold fix) that is the reason why navman tells you not to turn it on indoors (which is pathetic in my view).
If you use Oziexplorer (for example) you no longer have those problems and the maps are your maps not the smartst ones.
Conclusion: what I am trying to say is that the problem is smartst and not the GPS.
On a recent trip to the high country the GPS once lost the fix for a few minutes due to a heavy wooded area which was also surrounded by mountains while the Garmin with external antenna didn't, but the satellite view on both only had three visible satellites so it is understandable that the one inside the vehicle would loose it first.
If you use oziexplorer CE you also get a satellite view screen which makes sense instead of the silly green dot which comes with smartst.
In other words what you are having troubles with is smartst (which is OK if you only use it in the city).
For anything else you need to use other mapping software but the hardware is OK and does a good job, except for the windows CE 2003 and its glitches but we all know by now that Microsoft products are like that....
William

After some further reasearch on the web I found I have an issue with the PIN where by its gps date caluclation is wrong.

If anyones interested the info and a link to the file that resolved this can be found here Expansys

It appears that the fix for the bad date has made a dramatic time to fix improvement. Lets hope it stays that way.

I found it interesting that I reported this to NavMan in December last year and they didn't acknowledge the problem :(

Regards
Jason

Thanks are looking even better today.
Last night I did an update to the PIN’s firmware
Take a look at this thread for more info The firmware has made a very measurable improvement in satellite acquisition. Faster, more of them and all this on a very overcast day. I can now actually get a 3d fix in my office where previously couldn’t get 2d.

I would highly recommend it for anyone who has similar issues.

Regards
Jason

Link to the tool and firmware
link