Advantages: Greatly improved reception in built up areas Disadvantages: If externally mounted. It shows theives there is a Sat-Nav on board.
A very well designed product primarily designed to overcome reception problems in cars with heated windscreens that can adversely affect reception. Easy to install (good magnet allows you to site the antenna vitually anywhere on the exterior of the car).
I have found that it also helps in towns and built up areas where you can lose reception for a minute or two. It is supplied with more than enough cable to fit it virtually anywhere on the vehicle, however this does cause the problem of what you do with the excess cable (along with the cables already going to the power source). This can lead to a mess of cables trailing the dashboard. A permanent solution to this is difficult given the fact that it is not advisable to permanantly position a Tom Tom because of the rise in car crime.
These minor problems aside I would highly recommend ...
Advantages: Improves reception, loading time is dramatically reduced, Much better accuracy Disadvantages: plating is wearing off the connector
I found that my street pilot would lose reception under trees and between tall buildings.
My work as a field service engineer means that I spend a lot of time in the car and sometimes this was exrended unecessarily when I got lost in strange towns.
The other disadvantage was that it could take a couple of minutes to locate enough satellites for a good position fix. I noticed that the unit had a socket on the back for an external entenna, to I took to the web to find one.
Full price these antennae are about £40, but a quick search of ebay found me one for £14.95.
It arrived and I plugged it in. The cable is long enough for the antenna to sit at the back of the car (a Peugeot estate) in the middle of the roof, just above the tailgate. The cable was then led inside, tucked into the trims around the windows and doors ...
Advantages: Very fast connection speeds Disadvantages: None
After purchasing a Pocket PC (HP hx4700) mainly for use as a calender assistant and portable web browsing device, I soon discovered that it could also be used as a portable Sat Nav device as well, allowing applications such as Tomtom to be uploaded onto it, and for those who are interested in light aircraft flying, like me, memory map is fantastic aviation GPS program which can be used on using actual CAA aviation maps with GPS data overlay for flight planning and tracking purposes. The one extra hardware add-on which is needed to allow tomtom and memory map to function is a GPS receiver device. I had previously purchased a Compact Flash card extension GPS receiver which plugged into the Pocket PC's existing ports directly, unfortunately, it was very poor at satellite tracking and position locking, taking several minutes to lock-on to ...
