June travels to Scotland

[tpa]

Originally Posted by CameronCat

Sorry, gents; experience leads me to disagree with this one. Or you need a different satnav...some work really well.

We carried our Garmin -- "Bitchin' Betty" -- with us on our Haggis Hegira last Sept. It had updated UK maps on a micro-card (the US unit only came w/ N. American maps) and it worked an absolute treat on Skye and up to Thurso and on Orkney, plus guiding us round the inner workings of Aberdeen and Edinburgh.

I too use a Garmin and whilst mostly fairly good, particularly in towns where it tells you road names rather than numbers, it has 2 major failings:

1. It relies on you looking at the screen in many instances instead of being able to rely on the spoken instructions, which is a lot less than ideal approaching a busy junction, I've even accidentally missed an ill positioned red light as a result of this fortunately with no serious consequence.

2. It does not tell you about every junction. Other roads may or may not appear on the screen, but there is not a hint in the speech. So when barrelling along an apparently dead straight dark road at night, having been told that the next junction is a left turn 1½ miles away, it is somewhat disconcerting to come upon a T-junction ½ a mile further on which has no advanced warning sign and requires a very sharp stop followed by a right turn. I won't say what we called it after that.

I would be interested to hear if other systems suffer the same failings though realise that those available in the US may not have the same software as the UK versions.