Using GPS
We have taken countless wrong turns and exits, while driving in Malaysia, only to regret it later. When you take a wrong turn or miss a good one, you begin to worry about where it would lead you. It’s never fun, as Sneha and I discovered, especially when it takes you on to a freeway with no exits, until you reach the next town or the city.
And whenever that happened, all of us would go silent, worry about it and try getting our bearings back. It is not always easy and you can’t navigate purely by sense of direction. Those days are all but gone. Road navigation today is a world of exits, crazy loop flyovers, non-linear underpasses and fly-throughs. Tempers flare, you bicker on whose decision it was to go the way you did; and you stop enjoying your trip.
Adding a GPS receiver, for navigation, to your dashboard is a great way of avoiding all that. We opted out of a built-in car GPS system. Because one: it is usually more expensive; and two: it’s a headache to update the built-in unit with information, software and maps from the internet every now and then.
The dealer offered us a detachable TomTom unit and we agreed. But in the end, he gave us a Sony unit instead. We’re not sure we are happy with it.
If you know how a GPS receiver works, then you’ll know that it’s not really a real-time data download from satellites. There is, in fact, a 30-second delay between two successive satellite updates. If you’re going to be cruising across exits and intersections at 120km/h (or better, on those crazy German Autobahns), then you’ll realize that that 30-second lag is surely going to throw you off-track or make you miss a couple of turns.
This is where the software kicks in.
Some of the better units (TomTom and Garmin lead the pack) offer a quick GPS (signal) fix by substituting lack of real time satellite data with preloaded and most recent map data on the device and based on the vehicle speed and direction. The devices that can interpolate / extrapolate co-ordinates between successive updates can be time / life savers. In the end, it only makes driver’s life easier.
The device would be dead as a brick, if it fails to serve in crisis, no matter how good its graphics and resolution are. (Sony, this one’s for you: If you really want your device to fly, offer unmatched and regular updates; and fix that bloody lag time.) TomTom’s manual says that you should connect and download updates at least once a week! That’s how active its updating system is.
Time to swap the brick for a real device.