Finding House Names

[joroma]

One drawback on my Nuvi 250 is its apparent inability to find an address with a name such as a house name or building name. When I go into the address options I am only offered the option of entering a number. Lots of houses in small villages only have names! Is there a way round this?? When you put in a postcode I would have thought the Nuvi would list all the properties at that postcode as that would get round the problem??

[Oldboy]

Unfortunately the Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF®), which is what would be needed, holds some 28 million addresses for the UK. That would slow the satnav down.

Even with the data held in the PAF, there is no lat/long information that would be usable for satnav location.

If ALL the house names (and the house numbers) had an individual lat/long the file would be way bigger than the Map files. Probably running to more than 2GB. (The UK Map is some 200MB).
_________________
Richard

TT 910 V7.903: Europe Map v1045
TT Via 135 App 12.075: Europe Map v1120

[joroma]

Right. So is it the same for all sat navs?? Also you have the option to enter a postcode when asked for an address. How does the sat nav use the postcode info?

[Oldboy]

Each Postcode has a theoretic Centre Location. When you enter a Postcode a Lookup Table is used to find the lat/long to pass to the Satnav system as a location. This information is not always as accurate as it should be, and it has been known to "latch" to the wrong road.

It is basically the same for all satnavs.
_________________
Richard

TT 910 V7.903: Europe Map v1045
TT Via 135 App 12.075: Europe Map v1120

[PaulB2005]

Also worth pointing out that when the sat nav finds the road you want, it knows where and which side of the road the numbering starts. It also knows at what number the numbers stop and extrapolates all the house numbers between.

i.e. if a road has house numbers 1 - 50, it'll assume that number 25 is halfway along the road on the "odd" side. However this doesn't always work in the real world. Couple of roads near me have the road numbering in the wrong order...

So the sat nav doesn't actually know where 25 The Avenue, or 16 The Beeches is, it just knows where the road is, what the first and last house numbers are and guesses those in between.

House names have no chance.

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