Your Thoughts on Nav Aid

I have moved from a laptop with ozi on to a Navman with OziCE and Hema maps and find it great. I used it last week up at Fraser Island for a week and found it very good.

Either a 7" Win CE touch screen or GPS enabled mobile phone like a HTC touch are ideal for a compact in car mapping solution. Their resolution & SD memory is now good enough to make them easy to read & able to load every map of Oz you will ever need. The laptop is ideal to carry in the car for planning or backing up routes.


Cheers Craig.............

Wayne,

This is a never ending quest for the "ultimate" product that does all, but unfortunately each one of us has different criteria a I have come to the conclusion that no one device gives the best solution.

I have changed from a laptop, (SWMBO didn't like the intrusion) to a PDA, (best solution for a single device that does all, but a small display), to my current choice, a 5" Hema Navigator which gives me a great solution for OziExplorer and maps for remote area navigation, but an ordinary solution for city navigation and the problem that you cannot run both at once.

So, my solution for voice guided city navigation is a separate Tomtom Go 720 which in my opinion has the best solution for voice guided City navigation and includes ongoing map updates to keep the device accurate and practical.

The Hema Navigator has a practical and compact screen for both visual reference and touch screen interface and as it runs OziExplorer, using the Hema range of maps, gives me a very good moving map reference wherever I travel and records the track plot file and waypoints I add as required.
The voice guided city navigation application (Route 66) is nowhere near as good as Tomtom and as you can't run both OziExplorer and Route 66 at the same time makes this device lacking as a single device solution.

My PDA running OziExplorer (Country travel) and CoPilot (Voice guided city navigation) concurrently, with the ability to switch between both active programs, (using GPSGate) is the closest I found to the ultimate one device solution, with two exceptions.
The PDA is a little too small for my aging eyes to take in the available detail and the CoPilot city navigation application (a really good solution giving almost as good a solution as Tomtom) will apparently not be supported in the future for Australian use.

So, if you are looking for a single device to give you both Country and city Navigation solutions, your idea of a 10" laptop is a practical solution if you can find a practical way of mounting it. Unless you buy a touch screen capable PC however, you will need to use a mouse, or built-in mouse pad, to control the applications. I strongly recommend the addition of Franson GPSGate if you intend running multiple applications as it creates a virtual port for GPS input that can be shared concurrently between active applications.
Unfortunately though, A practical voice guided city navigation solution is becoming harder to find. Both Tomtom (the best) and CoPilot (almost as good) do not or will not provide a standalone application for use on a PC or PDA and my experience with Route 66 so far does not give me the confidence that I would recommend other people to invest in.

When I travel, I start OziExplorer to track my entire journey and as I reach the larger regional cities or towns, I can use Tomtom to give me voice guided directions through the built-up areas, without the need to shut down Ozi and thus lose continuity.

There are other solutions for both types of navigation requirements, such as the Garmin Nuvi device, but I have no practical experience with Garmin and their solution is "proprietary" in that it is only suitable for Garmin devices, unlike OziExplorer which is the "adopted" standard for Country wide moving map navigation and shareable with any device that's runs the OziExplorer application.

Unfortunately, both Tomtom and CoPilot are no longer available in Australia as a "stand alone" application that will run on Windows based devices. This is unfortunate as both provided great solutions for voice guided city navigation.

Route 66 may be OK for people that haven't tried the above two solutions, but is an "average" performer IMHO.

OziExplorer speaks for itself. There is no better solution for a open application to record, track and give moving map display wherever you may be in Australia and uses a wide range of reference maps. NAVMAP Premium and the excellent range of HEMA maps are two that I can recommend.

So, this is my experience with "these things"


Bill.

Dear Forumites near Perth (Mt Lawley).

I'd love to have a look at the HEMA 5" in operation - is anyone near me that's happy to have me have a shoofty??

Cheers.

Hi Wayne,

As you've found, and has been noted above, there's lots of alternatives.

I currently run a GPS PDA setup - ASUS A639 which has a built in GPS patch antenna, running Windows CE. I have OziExplorer on the laptop (which I take to route plan, load photos, video etc.). And OziExplorer CE on the PDA, with the HEMA mapset. This works well for off road travel. Ozi CE and the HEMA maps are loaded on a separate SD card. You can see a photo of the PDA, mounted in a window ram mount, in my profile pictures.

Recently I bought another SD card, and loaded on TomTom with the associated maps of Australia, and can use this for round town navigation. Just swap over the SD cards, and choose the "Tom Tom" app. from the PDA.

Only negative to this, which I can personally live with, is the smaller screen (4.3") compared to other more recent devices such as the HEMA and VMS types.

Good luck with your choice.

Cheers, Mark.

Hi Wayne
I, like you ran a laptop loaded with Ozi but found it too cumbersome. The laptop was then moved to the back seat and connected to am 8" touch screen, I found the touch screen pretty useless for Ozi and now use a bluetooth mouse which works well.
The wife like to keep a running log of sorts of trips we do, so I now run a 10" Dell which sits on a home made mount on her side.
The Dell is run in dual screen mode with Ozi running on the 8" and a word program on its screen. If the Dell in not required in the front it gets moved to the seat cover pocket of the drivers seat and the mount is removed.
It's probably all a bit of an overkill, but I like my gadgets and trying different things.
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Chris