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[Doctor Gollum]

Ah sat nav.

Went across country the other day toMarket Harborough. Wasnt familiar with the way. First thing. I thought was odd was we arrived at Countesthorpe which is quite near Leicester. No matter. Plugged on. Declned two gated roads as it was raining a lot.

In the old days you would have had a look at a map and then remembered the key villages/ junctions.

Ours surprised me today by saying use M1 and M62 to get the M6 for Scotland. I ignored that and went M1 A50. Still had miles of 50 mph withno onedoing any work apart from one man raking a bank the other side of the Armco.

M6 route is quicker, even to Edinburgh

[TheBoy]

The NCDC units were crap anyway, in my view.

You're entitled to that view. However wrong it is.
 

CD would constantly be spat out in morning, due to condensation the the disc. The maps were very old, to the verge of being pointless. They don’t take full postcode, often struggled with industrial estates or where no traditional road/number.

So the system you have done *nothing* to for 17yrs occasionally spits a disk out?  I'd wager you'd had at least 10 phones in that time.  So I know which is the most trouble free

Numbers and Roads are down to the making provider, of which all satnav manufacturers use 2 in the UK, TomTom/Teleatlas and Here/Navteq.  Its these companies that provide the road names and numbers.  They also provide the postcodes, with varying levels of accuracy.  Personally, I never use the postcodes, as its a great way to get to the wrong town.

Waze on the other hand, start app, says are you going home? Tap go and boom, multiple options based on live traffic data and dynamic routing updating as you go, based on traffic. Not once has it given me issues in position/routing.

I've used Waze, Goople Maps, and most other online services, and TomTom (both phones and standalone), Garmin, and all that tosh. They are universally useless.  Even on an iPhone X and a Galaxy S8 in small American towns (far more open than UK towns).  I can easily see why people drive the wrong way up motorways with these stupid devices, that should be banned IMHO.

Add in heat reflective screens, and they are truly lethal (in the hands of millennials and others born after common sense died).

[Nick W]

Numbers and Roads are down to the making provider, of which all satnav manufacturers use 2 in the UK, TomTom/Teleatlas and Here/Navteq.  Its these companies that provide the road names and numbers.  They also provide the postcodes, with varying levels of accuracy.  Personally, I never use the postcodes, as its a great way to get to the wrong town.

No, postcodes ensure you get to the right town. Look up Station Road in Rainham. The two I know of are on opposite sides of the Thames, and not far enough apart that you could reliably look at the distance and think that can't be right unlike the common Gillingham mixups. This cannot happen when you use an ME postcode for one and an RM for the other. None of the full postcode and house number systems I've used have been unreliable for locations(it taking you straight to the right part of a 3mile long road with eccentric numbering is really handy in the dark), the biggest problem I've had have been the horrible UIs that some have.

[STEMO]

I used waze for the first time today. It's no better or worse than google maps imo, but the screen is a bit busy for me, with your speed, the speed limit, petrol station and speed trap info, etc. All stuff I don't need.
Google maps is adequate for my needs but, then again, it's only about once every six months I need to use it.

[Andy H]

I went to the trouble of fitting a Ford branded factory navigation unit to SWMBOs 2002 Galaxy when she first got the thing 4 or 5 years ago.

It is a Blaupunkt RNS with a decent sized screen but it has a painful user interface and the newest available mapping is years old.

I gave up on it on a trip around France after I worked out how to download big chunks of mapping for Google Maps using WiFi

Since then we have driven round Ireland, New Zealand and Australia using Google Maps exclusively. A key advantage of a portable GPS for me is to be able to plan the next days driving while sitting indoors with a glass of beer rather than sitting in the car fighting a steam powered user interface

[TheBoy]

Numbers and Roads are down to the making provider, of which all satnav manufacturers use 2 in the UK, TomTom/Teleatlas and Here/Navteq.  Its these companies that provide the road names and numbers.  They also provide the postcodes, with varying levels of accuracy.  Personally, I never use the postcodes, as its a great way to get to the wrong town.

No, postcodes ensure you get to the right town. Look up Station Road in Rainham. The two I know of are on opposite sides of the Thames, and not far enough apart that you could reliably look at the distance and think that can't be right unlike the common Gillingham mixups. This cannot happen when you use an ME postcode for one and an RM for the other. None of the full postcode and house number systems I've used have been unreliable for locations(it taking you straight to the right part of a 3mile long road with eccentric numbering is really handy in the dark), the biggest problem I've had have been the horrible UIs that some have.

2 things with that, firstly the postcode data is often not 100% accurate - although not as bad as about 15yrs ago when one specific TomTom release had something like a 20% errors on postcodes.

Secondly, and more importantly, we as humans rarely mis-hear an address, but frequently is-hear random characters and numbers.  Added to that, its pretty easy to put the wrong postcode in.  You don't need to ask how I know this is easy done .  Fortunately satnag is just a secondary aid.  For this reason, I very, very rarely use postcode entry - I notice though, the National Trust seem to have stopped giving out addresses to their sites, just bloody postcodes

[Nick W]

I think that most of your problems with lots of stuff is that you're 57.5degrees out of sync with the rest of the world.

[Sir Tigger QC]

Operator failure.  That's all.