This product took me to within one U-turn of abandoning Garmin completely. It replaced a Garmin Quest which was, in my opinion and for my purposes, nearly perfect. I talk about that here. I could plot routes on my computer then transfer them to the Quest where they were used to guide me along the route just as desired. I would still be using a Quest today if Garmin hadn’t stopped providing map updates around 2005. It wasn’t the roads as much as the POI (Points of Interest). A rerouted expressway or a new exit probably won’t affect any of my routes which tend to follow old roads that haven’t moved in years. But I was using the Quest to find places to eat and sleep and, as time went on, more and more of the mom ‘n’ pop establishments in its data base closed down while the Quest continued to believe them very much alive.

The wild goose chases were aggravating and not being able to depend on there being a functioning motel where the GPS reported one was even more troublesome. With a west coast trip planned for 2011, I decided early in the year to update my guidance system. I did not feel tied to Garmin but some internet searching and forum combing indicated it was still probably my best choice.

Since being able to accept and play back a pre-plotted route is critical for me, I did my best to assure that I got a unit capable of that. It turned out that my best wasn’t good enough though it was awhile before I realized that. Through internet searches, GPS forum exchanges, and email conversations with vendors and Garmin employees I came to believe the 2460LMT would do the job. This unit was at or near the top of Garmin’s line of “automotive” products and, before too long, at or near the top of the “Most Irritating Things I’ve Ever Owned” list.

I ordered directly from Garmin and soon the 2460 was in my hands. After a little playing I tried downloading one of my pre-planned routes. The unit “froze”. Cycling power brought it back and I tried again. In time I realized that the freeze would eventually end on its own and tried various sequences of power, connect, and download but none produced a route on the nüvi. Through a series of emails and phone calls I reached someone at Garmin who seemed to really care. She tried her best. She ran experiments and asked questions and passed information back and forth with untouchable engineering personnel. Her best wasn’t quite good enough either. I did manage to get a tiny test route to appear but my real routes seemed to disappear. In what I took as a lame brushoff but which turned out to be a sorry truth, the engineering folks passed along that “some routes take a really long time.” I’ll skip the rest of the gorey details and let it be known that I did eventually get all of my routes loaded but it was always hours and sometimes days before a route was processed and usable on the nüvi.

Not surprisingly, my opinion of Garmin products was pretty low at this point but it got lower. The unit seemed to work fairly well as I traveled around the area and I even used it to successfully follow a couple of short test routes. I acquired the unit at the beginning of May. In early June I set out for a Lincoln Highway Association conference near Lake Tahoe. The nüvi contained routes intended to guide me along some of the Lincoln Highway’s historic alignments. That the nüvi had flaws became apparent rather quickly but it took awhile to understand them.

The two most onerous nüvi shortcomings are the inability to turn off automatic recalculation and its treatment of each segment as an independent route. A route is a start and end point and some number of intermediate waypoints. At least that’s the way the Quest and I and most routing software sees them. nüvis, however, see routes as nothing more than a list of start and end point pairs. When one point is reached, the nüvi then calculates a path to the next. Since it is always ready to recalculate a route, it does this, not from the point just reached, but from the current position. Here is the sort of real world problem this creates:

Your pre-plotted route contains a right turn just beyond a waypoint. The nüvi guides you to the waypoint and begins calculating a path to the next one. This is hardly instantaneous and you’ve passed that planned turn before it is done. The nüvi is automatically recalculating from your current position so it simply tells you to turn right on some other road then guides you to that next point along a completely different route than the one intended.

If all you want to do is reach the nearest Starbucks as quickly as possible, this behavior is just fine. It is far from fine if you want to reach that Starbucks along a particular road — like the Lincoln Highway or Historic Route 66.

The nüvi 2460LMT is not a bad product. It and all the other members of the nüvi line do what they are intended to do quite well. They are, in fact, the right device for the vast majority of GPS users. The problem is the way Garmin classifies its products. There is a line of products that does routing properly; The way the Quest does and the way I want. But it (zūmo^®) is marketed as a motorcycle line and it took someone outside of Garmin to set me straight. I replaced the nüvi® 2460LMT in less than a year. When I tell of that replacement in a future My Gear installment, I may also tell you what I really think of those silly names.

My Gear – Chapter 14 — Lenovo T400

My relationship with GPS receivers took a whole new direction when I got my a Garmin Quest. Some may recall that Garmin described my previous unit, the GPS III Plus, as having “cartographic capabilities”. It did not do routing of any sort. Before buying the Quest in June of 2006, I “test drove” a friend’s GPS V which Garmin called a “versatile navigator”. I believe it was. It did routing and may have served my purpose but it had been discontinued in January and getting current maps for it was already a bit of a problem. That could only get worse. At the end of the day, I opted to spend $345 for a new Quest.

The Quest had appeared in late 2004 and there was already a Quest 2 model when I made my purchase. The difference was memory. The Quest 2 had enough of it to hold the detail map for the whole USA. In fact, that detail map, City Select North America, was preloaded onto the Quest 2. The Quest came with a CD and enough memory to hold something on the order of Ohio or Indiana, or a strip crossing two or three states. The Quest was noticeably cheaper and I wanted the CD for off-GPS routing anyway. It seemed the obvious choice.

The Quest did require feeding when on a long trip and it was possible to overdrive whatever maps were loaded but it was otherwise ideal. It had a small color screen and a speaker. Its push-button controls were very similar to the familiar ones of the GPS III Plus. I could “Find” something with it then request that it “Route to” what I’d found. It would then guide me to my destination with visual and spoken directions. It did not speak street names, as some units were doing at the time, but street names were displayed. The voice (female and always calm no matter how many times I ignored her) might say “Turn right in 500 feet” and a glance at the screen would show the street name along with the zoomed in map. Even better than the Quest telling me how to get somewhere was me telling it how I wanted to get somewhere and it telling me how to do that in real-time.

I typically don’t merely want to get somewhere. I want to get there along a specific, perhaps historic, route. I don’t want the “quickest” or “shortest” route. I want “my” route. The one I carefully plotted on my PC. In this, the Quest was a willing and capable partner. There were some issues in getting my chosen path to the unit in a form that matched its maps but the complications came from the way I chose to do things and not from any Quest shortcomings. Once a route was properly tweaked and downloaded, the Quest would visually and verbally guide me along. As a more-often-than-not solo traveler. I appreciate this deeply.

Popping the Quest from its cradle was extremely easy and sliding it into a pocket just as easy. Its twenty hours of battery meant you really could do a serious walkabout and not lose your car. Even though I eventually bought an external antenna to boost reception on rainy days, the built in one was generally more than enough. In short, the Garmin Quest was as close to perfection as any GPS receiver I’ve had contact with.

It was maps that prompted me to replace it. In 2008 I bought a factory refurbished Quest because it came bundled with the latest detail map and was priced below buying just the map from Garmin. As it turned out, not only was this the latest City Select Map; It was the last. Current model Garmin GPS receivers use a map product called City Navigator. To an outside and somewhat casual observer, Garmin appears to abandon one line of development for another more often than seems necessary or wise. Since the Quest was so close to perfect, I assumed that newer models would be evolutionary and even closer. I was shocked and a little angered to discover that current models seem to be totally new developments that in some areas are much less capable than the 2004 model Quest. In my heart I know it’s doomed to fail but if anyone wants to start a “Bring Back the Quest” petition, I’ll sign.

My Gear – Chapter 10<br>Toshiba Satellite A105

The Garmin GPS III Plus was pretty high-end for a personal GPS in 1999. In July of that year, this baby set me back a whopping $355. Some rather detailed maps could be downloaded to it and it could tell you where things were relative to where you were but it couldn’t tell you how to get there. I’m fairly certain that there was a GPS IV that offered routing but I can find nothing online about it. Today’s web claims that the earliest GPS of this style that did routing was the GPS V. The GPS V was described as a “versatile navigator”. The III Plus merely had “cartographic capabilities”. I always thought of it as an automatically scrolling map.

I added a cable that allowed me to simultaneously connect it to the car’s 12 VDC cigarette lighter and to a computer’s RS-232 port. It was another one of those “computer in the car” things that rarely got used. I used the 12 VDC power almost constantly and I used the computer connection frequently but seldom at the same time. The frequent use of the computer connection was because the unit really wouldn’t hold much more than a day’s worth of maps and my end of day tasks often included refreshing the maps in the Garmin. Throw in a little expressway travel and it was entirely possible to “over drive” the loaded maps in a day. I did not buy an optional mount for the unit and got by quite nicely with a bit of velcro on the console.

You could select cities and other points of interest and the III Plus would point toward them and tell you how far away they were. If you chose one to “Go To” it would continuously report the remaining distance and time. Since the distance was “as the crow flies”, it and the time to go were only meaningful if the road between here and there was a straight one. I’m not really sure what it used to calculate that time to go; A rolling average speed is my guess. You could string together multiple way-points in what the III Plus called routes and it would provide total distance and time numbers based on straight lines between the way-points. This was essentially a fancy hiker’s handheld unit with the aforementioned “cartographic capabilities”.

The GPS III Plus led me to a style of navigating I called “jagging”. When I wasn’t following a specific route, like Historic Route 66, I would plug in a destination then head toward it. At each intersection, I’d make the decision of which way to go based on the direction of the destination from that point. You might think that would result in the shortest path but real roads are neither particularly straight or aligned squarely with others. “Jagging” put me on some interesting roads I might never have traveled otherwise.

My Gear – Chapter 2 — Toshiba Libretto

The three items at the heart of my road trip tool kit are a digital camera, a portable computer, and a GPS receiver. My first such set, the one used on that 1999 Route 66 road trip, consisted of this Garmin receiver along with the Agfa camera and Toshiba sub-notebook described earlier. Future purchases would be upgrades or replacements.

The blog post about the 100th trip pointed to a collage of 100 thumbnails representing them all. Just looking at that collage would bring a smile to my face for the first dozen times or so. But then I got questions about what the subjects were or what trip they represented. I knew all the answers but I quickly realized that the collage could really be improved. When an individual image appears on the home page, the subject and the trip it is from are identified beneath it. Clicking on the picture goes to the associated trip report. I decided that it would be cool if the collage did the same thing so now it does. Hovering over a section of the collage will reveal trip number and name and the identity of the subject. Clicking will take you to the trip report. Try it out here.