Living with an 865T

[Lost-by-Satnav]

You may have seen my previous posts about my 765T lasting les than a day before commiting suicide, followed by an 865T that also died in less than a week.

Well, Garmin exchanged the dead 865T for a "Newly Overhauled" one and kindly re-registered it for me. I'll not go into the details, but it had some previous connection with Toyota according to My Garmin.

However, the point of this post is to report how well (or otherwise) I have been getting along with my new toy.

Firstly, someone at Garmin really needs to look at the routing algorithms. Like others have experienced, it sometimes wants to take me off a main road, up a slip road and back on the main road again. It once dumped me off a main road, took me through back streets and some dodgy areas of Manchester to put me back on the same road when there were no traffic alerts or re-routing announcements.

It lives in a time warp of its own. Arrival times are seemingly calculated by a throw of the dice and you can be 5 miles from destination with an arrival time one minute away (not even in a Ferrari!), or on top of your destination and told you are two hours away.

Phone support is for the US market and out of nearly 20 phones tested in the company (well, you have to don't you), only an old Razr gave full support and worked solidly.

Will that stupid women stop announcing roads with three digits as "A One Hundred and Twenty Five" for example. Surely, even the dimmest programmer can cope with sorting this strange behaviour. Does not affect the routing, but it grates on you after a while. Oh, and please fix the repeated roundabout exit instructions to be BEFORE the car passes the exit.

It also like to randomly update the Bluetooth driver. From where? Why? How? In the process it wipes out the connections to my phones which can't be re-done while driving at 70mph on the M1.

Lastly, the Traffic alerts. Reception is hopeless. I have an RF engineering background and whatever you try with the supplied receiver/antenna will not give anything like a decent result in a lot of areas - period. The coverage in Yorkshire, particularly the M62 and A1 areas is shocking. When it does work, don't trust it. It wanted to re-route me off the M60 when there were no hold-ups whatsoever and other alerts are either too late or simply wrong.

Other than the above I am getting to sort of like it. A bit like taking in a bad tempered stray cat that claws the furniture and wets the carpet. You really want to throw it out of the window but you have become attached to it.

Ken

Leeds

[DennisN]

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