Dumb GPS Question

Andrew Sarangan wrote:
But you can't ask it to navigate
anywhere. In order to compute a route, you have to stand still for a
while (for long routes this could take a couple of minutes). In the
very least you should stay on one road while it is computing. Since
you are obviously not doing any of this while flying, the program will
never finish computing the route. My screen just said "computing
route" with a progress bar for a very long time. When it seemed like
it was getting close to the end, it would start all over again, and
the cycle never stopped. My guess is by the time it computed a route,
we were far from that position and an entirely new route had to be
computed. This may also have something to do with the processing
speed of the Dell AXIM.


I have seen something similar to this on a number of navigation programs
on PDA's. When you go to start a route the software does not allow
present position as your starting point, it forces you to give it an
address or some other point. Unbelievably stupid. The driving software
in the 496 is among the best I've ever seen, a nice suprise.

On Nov 25, 10:07 pm, Newps wrote:
Andrew Sarangan wrote:

But you can't ask it to navigate

anywhere. In order to compute a route, you have to stand still for a
while (for long routes this could take a couple of minutes). In the
very least you should stay on one road while it is computing. Since
you are obviously not doing any of this while flying, the program will
never finish computing the route. My screen just said "computing
route" with a progress bar for a very long time. When it seemed like
it was getting close to the end, it would start all over again, and
the cycle never stopped. My guess is by the time it computed a route,
we were far from that position and an entirely new route had to be
computed. This may also have something to do with the processing
speed of the Dell AXIM.

I have seen something similar to this on a number of navigation programs
on PDA's. When you go to start a route the software does not allow
present position as your starting point, it forces you to give it an
address or some other point. Unbelievably stupid. The driving software
in the 496 is among the best I've ever seen, a nice suprise.

Actually Tomtom starts all navigations from your current position. But
this is the problem when you use it in an airplane. Your current
position is literally flying at 120 knots, so the software can't keep
up.

William Bruce wrote:
I've just bought a TomTom GPS for my car with preloaded road maps of
the US and Canada. My question: Will it work in my 172 at 3,000 to
5,000 feet, showing the roads below, etc?

The only problem you will have is the issue with the TomTom telling you you
are on the road. It is designed to assume you are on the street or highway
and if it calculates something different it puts you on the closest road.

On 2007-11-22 17:45:50 -0800, "William Bruce" said:

I've just bought a TomTom GPS for my car with preloaded road maps of the US
and Canada. My question: Will it work in my 172 at 3,000 to 5,000 feet,
showing the roads below, etc?

Yes it will, but you could use a program like OziExplorer(www.oziexplorer.com)
and digital air charts, topographical maps or Google Earth images.