Monday, April 16, 2007
The road to nowhere?
I often hear people saying they can't wear a watch because their personal magnetic field plays havoc with the clockwork, or batteries, or both - perhaps I have the same effect on chip-based devices, since my Mio DigiWalker 269+ has started to misbehave.
Since buying it in early 2006 I've put up with a few glitches - such as the time it thought I'd taken off while driving over the Donnersbergerbrücke in Munich, since my speed was quoted as over 1000kmh and I'd reached a height of 8000 metres above sea level ... maybe it mistook a plane for a GPS satellite.
Generally the problem is that the system often loses view of all satellites and takes up to 20 minutes to find them again ... or that the internal battery loses its charge over a week or so without use.
So of course the latest malfunctions happened during the course of a 3300km road trip around Europe in which we went from Munich to Calais via Luxembourg, then to Manchester and the Peak District, then back home via Strasbourg (which is an unmissable great city for sightseeing).
The jitters began on the first day - we'd planned to park our rented motor caravan overnight at facilities in an obscure location at the back end of Saarbrücken. All the stops had been pre-programmed into the device and we had made the mistake of trusting the technology.
After midnight and hundreds of KM finally behind us at a stately 100 max speed in the mobile, the navi just seized, completely, 3.3km from the autobahn exit we were supposed to take. Of course we hadn't been checking every minute to see if the navi was still working ... much swearing ensured and I came close to putting the device under the wheels of a three-tonne vehicle. After 20 minutes of driving around Saarbrücken while trying to reboot / reset the DigiWalker and wait for it to eventually find a signal, we gave up and drove to a motorway services in Luxembourg - having covered this route a few times we knew where to find it, and how to reach Calais from there without digital navigation assistance.
Eventually the device did come back to life - somewhere near Brussels (so several hours later) it managed to find a GPS satellite and work out that we were, surprise! in Belgium. Great work for a Belgian company!! Yay!!!
After that we did our own navigation using trusty old printed maps and local knowledge, although the disgraced DigiWalker was still on, for the TMC traffic warning info - the single feature that proved to be the decision maker in choosing the Mio model. For this to work effectively, we'd also put in our destination - a campsite near Leek in Staffs. During a motorway services stop, I consulted the navi for its opinion on our next manoeuvre - and was told: "Please follow the road for 3,582 miles."
Yeah, right.
This time I had the camcorder handy - so here's a video clip.
There's finally an upgrade to the Mio-branded Navigon software - so perhaps that will iron out the glitches.
Since buying it in early 2006 I've put up with a few glitches - such as the time it thought I'd taken off while driving over the Donnersbergerbrücke in Munich, since my speed was quoted as over 1000kmh and I'd reached a height of 8000 metres above sea level ... maybe it mistook a plane for a GPS satellite.
Generally the problem is that the system often loses view of all satellites and takes up to 20 minutes to find them again ... or that the internal battery loses its charge over a week or so without use.
So of course the latest malfunctions happened during the course of a 3300km road trip around Europe in which we went from Munich to Calais via Luxembourg, then to Manchester and the Peak District, then back home via Strasbourg (which is an unmissable great city for sightseeing).
The jitters began on the first day - we'd planned to park our rented motor caravan overnight at facilities in an obscure location at the back end of Saarbrücken. All the stops had been pre-programmed into the device and we had made the mistake of trusting the technology.
After midnight and hundreds of KM finally behind us at a stately 100 max speed in the mobile, the navi just seized, completely, 3.3km from the autobahn exit we were supposed to take. Of course we hadn't been checking every minute to see if the navi was still working ... much swearing ensured and I came close to putting the device under the wheels of a three-tonne vehicle. After 20 minutes of driving around Saarbrücken while trying to reboot / reset the DigiWalker and wait for it to eventually find a signal, we gave up and drove to a motorway services in Luxembourg - having covered this route a few times we knew where to find it, and how to reach Calais from there without digital navigation assistance.
Eventually the device did come back to life - somewhere near Brussels (so several hours later) it managed to find a GPS satellite and work out that we were, surprise! in Belgium. Great work for a Belgian company!! Yay!!!
After that we did our own navigation using trusty old printed maps and local knowledge, although the disgraced DigiWalker was still on, for the TMC traffic warning info - the single feature that proved to be the decision maker in choosing the Mio model. For this to work effectively, we'd also put in our destination - a campsite near Leek in Staffs. During a motorway services stop, I consulted the navi for its opinion on our next manoeuvre - and was told: "Please follow the road for 3,582 miles."
Yeah, right.
This time I had the camcorder handy - so here's a video clip.
There's finally an upgrade to the Mio-branded Navigon software - so perhaps that will iron out the glitches.
# posted by Nesjo : 11:40
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