Different Datums

skippyzoid · Occasional Visitor Joined: May 24, 2005 Posts: 7

Recently the Wife broke down in the middle on no-where without being able to give road names or anything (One tree and field looked pretty much like another to her), she too has a PDA equiped with tomtom etc, I got her to goto the GPS status screen read off the co-ordinates and then I would enter them into my tom tom and navigate to her. Sounded simple eh? Nope.. The datums are different, fortunatly I was near an internet connection and used multimap to locate her which shows the other datum on the map and then this was entered into tom tom, and then I duly navigated to her.

Shame it needed a third party solution to convert across the datums, I couldnt do the maths in my head (doh)

I cant believe that this hasnt come to light before now, why use different datums?, for this purpose it didnt matter which they selected just that they should have been the same.

If there an alternative GPS driver that will work with tomtom, that perhaps is the same.

lbendlin · Posted: Tue May 24, 2005 7:44 pm Post subject:

It's definitely not using different datums. It's always on WGS84.

What has thrown you off is the different display of Lat/Lon between the two devices.

In the GPS setup you can select between

d.ddddddddd
d`mm.mmmm
d`mm``ss

Of course you can only enter the coordinates in the last form, so it makes sense to configure your TomTom GPS accordingly to avoid the headscratching
_________________
Lutz

Report Map Errors here:
TomTom/TeleAtlas NAVTEQ

skippyzoid · Occasional Visitor Joined: May 24, 2005 Posts: 7

You're right, not that I doubted you, I send a note to TomTom support and they said they'd refer it to their software developing team -

>- Thank you for your feedback , It will be passed to our software development team. -<

Surely the first line support should have known this, even if the user (me) didnt Embarassed

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