Using sat nav in ireland

My sat nav, a poor peoples (stand alone) Garmin was 100% perfect in Ireland!!!

Feed it with decimal lat/long for your various destinations it'll get you there within mm's.

On Google Earth, wherever you put the arrow, the lat/long is at the bottom of the page........

Same as everyone else - the fitted TomTom nav system is poor.  Its doesn't know road closures or what the traffic conditions are ahead and the mapping is only as good as the last paid update.  I have used Waze, GoogleMaps and AppleMaps on my mobile phone which are good but I found the screen a bit small so have just bought a standalone 7" TomTom Camper Max with free updates and real time traffic information via my mobile phone.

Nothing wrong with Garmin but I have a Tomtom Camper in van and basic in MX5, both are logged into the same account and destination programmed in app or on laptop then synced to both. The online traffic monitoring (2G built in) in the camper has proved its worth all over Europe many times.

Google maps is great if you have a phone signal but don't feel comfortable with Waze (although not used much).

kevjan wrote:Hi all, personally i would not trust any Sat Nav a decent up to date map is far better but that is only my opinion. Kevin

Its interesting how we always seemed to manage pre-Sat Nav.  Before a long journey I studied the map, memorised the route and then wrote a simple route card which I placed in a prominent position on the dash so I could read it as I was driving.  If I missed a turning I could generally get back on route, if necessary by stopping and re-reading the map.  Things changed after we bought a caravan when going off route could get stressful, especially as my wife doesn't map read.  Our first Sat Nav some 30 years ago didn't come soon enough.  It was a Navman running on a palm PC in a GPS sleeve.  It wasn't perfect so we still had to use the paper map.  Now SatNavs are so much better, we rarely use a paper map.

My first experience of GPS was with a receiver plugged into laptop running Autoroute on my sons knees in France. It didn't give directions but he could see when we had gone off route. I then moved to a Palm in a cradle - first time it crashed just as I approached Paris from the north so had to pull over and reset everything but it worked - It also worked well without background mapping in association with paper maps in Florida and Mexico.

I never go on a serious walk (very rare now) without a paper map but must be ten years since I've referred to one during the walk.

My view on maps is that, in EU at least, the road numbering is so complex, sometimes several numbers for the same road, that they are useless.
The sat Nav is infinitely more accurate especially to some of the remote and obscure places we tend to go.
The big reason though not to use a map, is that we're here to see the country, not a bl88dy map!!!

Doesn't affect us now, we don't carry maps at all....