Sat nav and post codes.

[Lazydocker]

Modern portable units are pretty good. As said, I use Tom Tom on my phone because it's convenient. But the heat reflective screen and high buildings can cause issues occasionally

[Lazydocker]

Buy a quality car and you get a quality satnav fitted - works off postcodes, roads, street nos, towns, motorway junctions etc etc, no connection issues in towns, woods etc.  Ties into current traffic info and immediately advises detours.  Also voice controlled if required.

Not everyone wants (or can afford) to spend large sums on cars

[Field Marshal Dr. Opti]

I fail to see the fascination with postcode. Whats wrong with town/road?

On the upside, TomTom in particular have dramatically improved their postcode accuracy in recent years, but than they had a poor base to start from (20% were incorrect when they first added the postcode function).


As to accuracy, portable units, including phones, are utter shite. Hence my last portable unit is somewhere towards the end of the Aston Expressway, when the piece of shit pissed me off for the last time.  A proper inbuilt one can remain accurate even with no GPS signal for ages (days in the case of the CARiN fitted to MFL).  The biggest reliability issue with Omega factory units is the ABS ECU...   ...no speed pulse, no go anywhere.

Anyone choosing to disagree strongly needs to re-read and understand the technology.


That said, the portable/phone units are often adequate, as long as not in wooded areas or modern areas or large cities.

Out in the middle of nowhere luxury such as town, road, and number are not always available.

Just spotted this address on a packet of gel pens.

New Ford Road.

EN8 7PG.

[Marks DTM Calib]

Dead easy on a CD70

[Entwood]

Postcode is not all its cracked up to be either, friend of mine lives at a named not numbered house in a village .. postcode is SN4 0HH ... use that in a sat nav and you could be about 2 1/2 miles from his place as it covers the WHOLE of Ham Road from Wanborough to Liddington !!

[Mr Gav]

Postcode is not all its cracked up to be either, friend of mine lives at a named not numbered house in a village .. postcode is SN4 0HH ... use that in a sat nav and you could be about 2 1/2 miles from his place as it covers the WHOLE of Ham Road from Wanborough to Liddington !!

It`s the same with York University, YO10 5DD but that covers the whole university.

We have done a few buildings there in the last couple of years and you have to give your suppliers the road name too as the post code puts them right outside the information centre.

This has come about because as the University has grown the post code has remained the same so there are probably half a dozen roads all with the same post code 

[Marks DTM Calib]

About ten years ago a good friend used Sat Nav to get to RIAT at Fairford, he entered the postcode on the ticket and ended up at Swindon post office   

[Field Marshal Dr. Opti]

Dead easy on a CD70

You must have an old disc.


My 2014 disc does not support partial post code facility.

On a brighter note. My crappy old Ebay 2007 disc lost it's TMC/dynamic guidance facility somewhere along the line. This is now working again.

[TheBoy]

Portable unit accuracy is shite? What utter 'dangle berries'. Set a destination and drive down the motorway at 110MPH. It counts down the distance to exit as you pass the appropriate markers: how the hell can it be inaccurate? It consistently displays the map for exactly where you are at junctions. I used mine for years to find the house number on long roads in the dark using just the number and the postcode. Or to find housenames on country roads. Drive through the Blackwall Tunnel, and it loses the signal about 1/4 of the way through. But, it carries on with your speed and picks up the signal the instant you exit the tunnel in enough time to direct to the correct exit. It works. It's that simple. Mine is the basic, small-screen, no bells and whistles European maps unit that I paid about £120 for about 6 years ago.

In the open, they work quite well - still nowhere near a proper unit which has the benefit of speed signals and gyroscopes or magnetic compasses.  Its when the signal gets week (underground roads, forests, cities), all the portable units can use is dead reckoning, which is find in a long swiss tunnel at a constant 50mph, but bleeding hopeless/dangerous somewhat inconvenient on the roundabout under Canary Wharf.

I know, I've been there. Hence mine was discarded, as it was actually more of a hinderence than a help. And I do not regret chucking £150's worth of "working" up to date technology out of the window...   ...maybe somebody had a good day, or maybe it smashed, I care not. Even now when I have to use a car without a built in unit, the options I have on the iPhone - TomTom, CoPilot and whatever NavFree is now called (with TomTom being the best of them by some margin) - whilst being feature rich, all suffer the same old portable problems of location accuracy in "difficult" areas (ie, when needed most - as most people over the age of 30 can easily, trivially get to the town/village without assistance.

[TheBoy]

Buy a quality car and you get a quality satnav fitted - works off postcodes, roads, street nos, towns, motorway junctions etc etc, no connection issues in towns, woods etc.  Ties into current traffic info and immediately advises detours.  Also voice controlled if required.

I've used the older Jag one (DVD, not HDD), and it seems to have the features people like to moan about, including postcodes .  I found touchscreen harder to use than the NCDC entry - defo need to pull over to set destination, as you should really .

The interface was non-intuitive to me, but that's just a case of familiarisation. I'd be happy with that system

[TheBoy]

Oh, and the housenumber is only available with postcodes is a myth - all systems use one of 2 mapping companies, so all have access to same data, no matter if using postcode or road name.

Not all roads have numbers on the maps, my own included. It depends on the digital data from the likes of TT or NT