How Tinkerbell fell from grace and Dotty was born

My confession that I had finally fallen for a sat nav indicated that the device was to be known as Tinkerbell. I regret to say that she has fallen from grace and is now known as Dotty.

This is not to say that she is of no value but it also indicates that her predecessor remains the queen of my navigation needs. Indeed I had been happy with my own sat nag for years. Her ability with a map had been honed by practise. Her awareness of motoring conditions were based on her own experiences. And, essentially she knew when shutting up was the only real option. She had even almost lost that strange female ability to say left when she means right. And she no longer sent me into paroxysms of doubt as she turned the map upside down!

For years I have viewed the sat nav as a £200plus solution to a £5 problem. For long have I argued that I have a perfectly good sat nag so why should I have need of an electronic replacement which will lack her charm and sense of humour?

Anyway now you can get one for under £100 we have our first sample from Garmin. She started life as Tinkerbell. True she is absolute crap on rural roads, especially if you know them well. Yes she will fail entirely to observe that the road you are joining is the MAJOR road and you should be stopping or giving way. There are times when her routing can be cranky. I have sorted out some pretty strange result of poor preferences. Since when did 'avoid' mean 'never use under any circumstances'? I reasonably assumed that 'avoid toll road' would mean a simple preference for not paying where possible. Oh no, Tinkerbell got it into her head that a 40 kilometre detour round Rheims was better than four Euros of A-road. Turned that off, I did. Now of course she won't use anything BUT toll roads!

Oh yes and despite the quality of the GPS service, following some of her instructions would have sent our caravan up a cul-de-sac! Given the accuracy of GPS the thing must have seen the extra Impasse right turn BEFORE the right right one? And she has told me to turn right on a main road when what existed was just a Z-bend. It turned out a chalk farm track had caught Tink's attention and caused the bizarre instruction. No mention of the succeeding left hander though!

I thought I had discovered what was wrong with Tinkerbell and that it may not extend to more expensive and therefore more sophisticated systems. Garmin may not be using actual maps to drive its system. Sound odd? Read on.

GPS may be a wonderful thing but in fact the satellite positioning is only the start of the story. All that does is let the device receiving the signals (three usually) to know where it is ON THE PLANET. The reason the US decided to make the system free to users was simple – the users have to do all the hard work and it costs. And by making the service free the US taxpayer was less inclined to argue about the huge cost – this was after all a military system in the first instance.

The device gets the signals and knows where the satellites are so 'it' knows where it is in latitude and longitude terms. The software then compares this with the software map data stored in the device – expensive programming. The data is 'maps' but maps come in many forms and how much detail they contain is highly variable and subject to high copyright costs. Now comes the risk/problem/danger. ONLY if the map contains information can the device tell you about it.

If you use, for reasons of cost, relatively inexpensive 'maps' are used they will be more like atlases, with limited detail and scale. When it come to towns then the detail reduces still further. So here I believe is what can and does happen.

Tinkerbell tells us the route and may even give us the road number (I'll come to that oddity later). The road is subject to priority variations determined for traffic safety and management reasons. What looks like the 'main' road may not be. So the user drives along for X kilometres and Tinks is silent. But twice we have to halt because ours is the minor road. Nothing from Tink. Then she tell us (driving on the right) to 'keep left on the D43'. No we cannot because we are driving on the right and this is actually a left turn across oncoming traffic. Again the system is blind to the priorities on the road if they are not on its map/atlas. Then we arrive at our destination: 'Turn right at Rue de la Republique' stumbles Tink. No such road name is to be seen. We have been on the D43 and she said so. Now we are turning on trust. Our destination is not on the boards, and not on Tink's screen. We turn and she tell us to travel '9 kilometres on Rue de la Republique'. Oh dear, I don't think so. The road is the D79 and not once do we see a sign telling us it is any sort of named Rue. Suddenly she tells us to keep right on the D79. Hooray but hang on, its just a bend in the road not a junction.

At about this point Tinkerbell became Dotty. Part of the cause was our utter amusement at what passes for French pronunciation. But this is made worse by the fact that Dotty wants to call every road by the name it may have on her atlas. So a major road can become the Rue something unrepeatably NOT even Franglais! Worse the name is not on any road sign since even here the French are using the road number. And as for her language! General s a common road name. In French it is a hard g and stressed – thus it sounds like Gay-nay-rarl. In English it is of course Jen-er-al. Dotty makes it Gayen-air-eel. Actual names are even worse – and remember, she is likely to be telling you to turn right at XYZ namer when all the signs will tell you is what you want to know – D999 or whatever. Of course we know this because my sat-nag is monitoring the sat-nav with a MAP! Without I fear what could by now have happened. Dotty she is and Dotty she will remain.

Later I was offered a huge update for the Western Europe maps on my device. When I found a fast enough broadband connection for a TWO GIG download I accepted it on my netbook. It took the thick end of an hour. The screen said THREE! Then, downloaded, it did something Garmin calls 'building'. No time was given but it took over 20 minutes. THEN it said 'installing' and estimated an hour, which would be about right given the download time! I re-booted later and expected Dotty to become Madame Bouverie, get all her pronunciations right and stop calling major road without apparent names by some garbled version of an irrelevance. No such luck. Exactly what was updated \|I shall never know and whit it took three hours is a mystery. Unless of course they were doing it like it used to be in the 90s and loading an entire new up-dated programme and killing the entire old one. As opposed to saving a zipped version as back up and simply overwriting the relevant bits before killing the old prog.

So am I/we using Dotty? The answer is yes but never without a map open and in play. She is great at getting you to specific points in towns and cities (although her knowledge of one-way system can be flawed). She is great at getting you back on course if you divert. She is unreliable in detail – twice she had proudly told us “Arriving at Camp XYZ, on right” and it has been on the LEFT.

My theory is that the system is set up for the UK but is using European maps without fully changing the side of road on which we are driving. This might account for the potentially dangerous “keep left” description. I also think the mapping Garmin are using does not contain enough road priority information.

Dotty would be helpful for anyone driving on their own in the UK but would need to be used with care in Europe.

She is good at finding shops, banks, garages, museums, places of interest etc. And being able to assign as favourites temporarily frequent destinations (e.g. camp sites) is brilliant. They form a sort of 'go home' instruction which is also one of her assets. I hit that button by accident here in the Vaucluse and after a very long time 'calculating' she announced 1,198 kilometres, ETA 16.57 “GO”. Not yet Dotty but your time will come.

Experience does not improve impressions. Dotty demand that St as in Saint be fullt spelt out. As a result it appeared she had no idew of places like St Remy de Provence. Worse in some cases she will refuse to find the place you want or follow the post code she then uses to tell you where a place is. For example however I tried to enter St or Saint Gilbert she refused to find it and offered a place hundred of kilometres away. So I switched to the post code 13150. She refused to recognise it. And then, when I cheated by asking for a place next door she told me the road IN St Gilbert was in post code … you gussed, 13150!

But we had some fun when we detioured to find a special quarry up an impasse – finally she told us – proceed 80 metres and do a u-turn! Hooray!

But not hooray when she continues to identify places on the wrong side of the road! “Arrive at destination X on left” Oh no it not – its one the right! Might account for some collateral damage since the GPS drives bomb and missile targetting. Oops, sorry the arms dump was on the other side to the local school....