Inforad GPS Camera Information System

...mishtake Chrish. Ed), and the Inforad seemed like a good one to me.

At £79 including the first year's subscription to database updates, it's a damned sight cheaper than using 'real' satellite-navigation just to find speed cameras. Subsequent years cost £24.99, or there's a life-time sign up fee of £49.99.

Besides which, if you have a PDA, or laptop, with some suitable mapping software, it also interconnects, to be used ...
...digress.

The Inforad is a small black box (it had to be, didn't it?) about the size of a cigarette packet, with a small array of tri-coloured LEDs and a USB socket. It also has two buttons which I'll cover later. This simplistic approach enables its normal operation to be entirely hands-free, and without the need to give it more than a glance whilst driving.

When fitted in the car, it should be sited on or near the dashboard ... more

NOTE: Having owned this device for nearly a year since I first wrote about it, I now have certain misgivings and further comments to make. The bulk of what I wrote, I stand by, so I've just added paragraphs under the headings of "UPDATE".

Back to the plot….

It's not my intention to restart the "speed camera - money-spinner or accident deterrent?" debate.

For every one who feels that speeding drivers are law breakers, deserving of punishment, there seems to be a conspiracy-theorist who reckons that speed cameras are merely a revenue raiser for the police.

There does indeed seem to be an inverse relationship between the number of cameras proliferating around west London to the numbers of actual 'TraffPol" on the roads, who could also be chasing up other miscreants as well as speeders, like the sudden rash of stupid bastards I've seen going the wrong side of a traffic island just to get further down a queue at some lights near me. These people could so easily kill a pedestrian, who quite rightly, would be looking the other way at the time.

To be honest, this second opinion does carry some weight. I honestly can't remember the last time I saw someone being chastised for a broken rear-light or some lack of road-worthiness.

No, the only ones getting caught around here are those that get flashed by speed (and junction) cameras.

I take the middle ground.

I have no quarrel* with the Gatso Camera in principle, as long as its original purpose, i.e. to make people more aware of potential accident black-spots (and by implication, reduce the death toll) remains the main reason for siting them.

*Would anyone care if I did anyway?

A case in point relates to a stretch of dual carriageway near me that's been a '40 limit' since the year dot. It's now been changed to 30. No real warning is given - after all, the road is in an urban area and is lit, so you're supposed to assume it's a 30 limit - but of course if you're local and have driven this way for 40 years, you might not notice the sudden lack of 40 mph signs.

To be fair, there is the tiniest of 30 mph reminder signs, but this is frequently obliterated when overtaking a slowing bus.

It therefore will come as no surprise that the authorities have sited a speed camera exactly at the point where the road widens to a dual carriageway, i.e. where it gets safer, not more dangerous.

Revenue-earner or accident-preventer? Hmmmm, I'd have to think about that one.

However, if you want further fuel for the conspiracy-theory argument, look no further than west London's free press. Apparently, a man is on the run after failing to turn up in court charged with causing £165,000 worth of criminal damage to speed cameras and £1,000,000 of estimated LOST REVENUE to the Police. Of making 'accident blackspots' less safe was there no mention - how strange!

This is also why I have no moral objection to carrying a Speed Camera detector in my car. After all, why can't I have ADVANCED warning of an 'accident blackspot' - just because I'm NOT speeding at the time doesn't mean I wouldn't benefit from the information.

This is precisely the argument put forward by the makers of Inforad, a GPS-based camera detector. Since this works from a Europe-wide database of known speed camera sites, it's not illegal, unlike carrying a radar detector to pick up the police radio frequencies. After all, if you wanted to stick pins in a map to remind you where the speed cameras are, and by implication, accident black-spots are, is that so bad?

Let me clarify one thing - I don't set out to speed, and I think my driving record of 0.75 million miles with just one endorsement in 1970 when I was 20, speaks for itself.

Habitual speed merchants just don't get that lucky!

However, I DO like a good gadget (no, surely shome mishtake Chrish. Ed), and the Inforad seemed like a good one to me.

At £79 including the first year's subscription to database updates, it's a damned sight cheaper than using 'real' satellite-navigation just to find speed cameras. Subsequent years cost £24.99, or there's a life-time sign up fee of £49.99.

Besides which, if you have a PDA, or laptop, with some suitable mapping software, it also interconnects, to be used as the GPS receptor for satellite navigation.

This enables packages like MS Autoroute 2005 to plot your exact position on a map. I haven't gone down this road (sorry!) yet, since I rarely need to chart new territory. I think my neighbour put me off 'sat-nav' one day whilst showing off his own.

'All I did was put Bentall's in Kingston's postcode into it and it guided me all the way there!" says he.

'But you KNOW where Bentall's is' says I.

WHAT IS IT?

Anyway, I digress.

The Inforad is a small black box (it had to be, didn't it?) about the size of a cigarette packet, with a small array of tri-coloured LEDs and a USB socket. It also has two buttons which I'll cover later. This simplistic approach enables its normal operation to be entirely hands-free, and without the need to give it more than a glance whilst driving.

When fitted in the car, it should be sited on or near the dashboard area so that its internal antenna can 'acquire' the required number of satellites (at least three) to plot your current position. Owners of cars with metallic 'athermic' windscreens may also need to buy the additional plug-in antenna, but the Inforad website (http://www.gpsinforad.co.uk/) carries a list of known vehicles with these fitted.

It draws its power from a cigar lighter plug adapter which in turn supplies the USB lead with 5 volts. Inforad can arrange for it to be more permanently 'plumbed', but personally, I'd rather be able to tuck it into the glove compartment when not in use.

SET UP

To be honest, there's very little. You download the Inforad Manager from the internet site and install it on your PC. This could presumably be the laptop for sat-nav purposes if you want, but there's no reason not to use your home PC - I guess if you lived on a canal boat, even this would show you where you are if you didn't know already!

Once installed, you plug in the Inforad via its USB lead to the PC and follow the instructions firstly to register it for warranty purposes and then to check the latest version of the camera database. Once this is done, you can run diagnostics. This probably isn't needed unless you have difficulties making it work.

One nice touch about registering the Inforad is that, should it get stolen, with or without the car attached, you can have it rendered inoperable, as with stolen cellphones.

At this stage, you can also make alterations to its configuration. One such is to alter the amount of warning both in time and distance that you get when approaching a camera. You may feel that the 'nanny knows best' approach is best, and in fact to kick off with you'd be right.

For reasons I'll explain later, you might want to adjust these settings.

That's about it. Now put it in the car. Inforad suggest placement on the dashboard so that the sky is visible vertically through the screen. This is messy to wire up and looks cheap and nasty with wires dragging across your filed of view. I placed mine atop the steering column where it protrudes from the dashboard - that way, I can see the LEDs more clearly, which is important if you want to mute the bleeper. It's also a neater place to start concealing wires within the Stygian depths of the under-dash. The only downside is that it takes a trifle longer to 'acquire' satellites at this angle.

ON FIRST USE

Upon switching on of the ignition, the green LED flashes. This shows that the box is still acquiring satellites. This wouldn't be a good time to hare off at 90 (Sweary!).

A longer single bleep followed by a constant green LED shows that it is now on-line, monitoring your position (in a large selection of European countries, as it happens).

Should you approach a known camera position, three short bleeps are heard and the LED changes to a flashing red. Should the bleep become continuous during this period, you are going too fast - this really does seem accurate, and I have deliberately raised my speed to about 42 mph prior to a camera with a 40 limit (little devil aren't I?) to prove it. True to form, the constant bleep goes silent once the required speed reduction is made.

If you think that this all sounds like too much bleeping, you can rely on a visual warning only, by muting the sounder with a press of the left hand button, but this resets itself to bleeping every time you switch on, it seems..

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned either the right-hand button or the orange LED yet.

When you approach an unlisted hazard, or just something you want to remember, like a junction camera or the start of a 20 mph zone outside a school, for example, you can press the right hand button for the Inforad to memorise it. Next time you approach it, the orange LED flashes and you get a rising crescendo of beeps as you approach the precise spot, diminishing as you pass it. For this reason, I'd recommend that you only locate the centre of the hazard when logging it in the first place, not the start and finish of it, otherwise you'll get two sets of beeps. It works fine for the 20 mph zone outside a school, but not for a whole street length.

Back at base, you can upload the new datum points you've added yourself to your Inforad Manager. Personally, I'd keep a note of what you have added, (and when),as the list presents itself as a set of dates with longitude and latitude readings from the GPS, leaving you 8 characters to type in a suitable note (e.g. SC20ZONE or somesuch)

You can even upload these to Inforad via their web-site, and if thought to be worthy of listing (like a speed camera they didn't know about), they'll certify it and add it to the common database.

I notice from the comments, that despite to ability to update from the web as often as you like, there seems to be some suggestion that it takes a while for new speed cameras to be registered. Better hope it wasn't the one you just streaked past.

TOO BLEEPING FIDDLY?

Well, I have to admit that once the initial fascination had worn off, it did bleep rather a lot, and for hazards I knew were there anyway. I guess it will only come into its own when we drive to Wales this Spring.

There are a few things it CAN'T tell you. Recently, whilst testing it out, I received a bleep with no sign of a camera on either side of the road, the A4 in Brentford as it happens. Of course, the M4 elevated section which does have cameras, was directly ABOVE me, so there's one thing it can't plot - your altitude!

Likewise, whilst by-passing the A4 the other day down some local back-double, it bleeped to warn me of the camera in my vicinity, even though I was not even on the same road. However, I was within its warning parameter of some 280 yards hence the bleep. I have since altered this in the Manager settings so that I only get a 100 yard warning at 30 mph. This seems plenty and has effectively eradicated that little nonsense.

For obvious reasons, it can't detect moving or temporary speed traps, but since it's designed to help you find 'accident blackspots', there's not much you can do about that except behave yourself.

It would appear, from my experience of driving the A505 between Baldock and the M11 the other day, that there seems to be no procedure for REMOVING cameras from the database, since many of my 'beeps' on this road only related to where THERE USED to be a camera. I suppose you could always e-mail them. However, how often is this an issue?

UPDATE: The longer my first year of ownership drags on, the more of an issue this becomes. I've just returned from a lengthy motorway trip from west London to The Lake District, and have now got heartily sick of it reporting speed cameras that I can only conclude USED to be there, chiefly on long-term motorway road-works that have now been resolved. The now completed dualling of the M6's Thelwall viaduct over the Mersey and Manchester Ship Canal being a case in point. I wouldn't mind but they're always for lower speed limits, so cruising past a phantom site at 70 mph brings forth a howl of warnings that you're way over-speed. To expect the motorist to mark their own datum point and report back to base that this no longer exists as a camera site is asking too much I feel.

This is especially true since the means to send in an update is far further from being automated than I'd at first hoped. Any new data contained on your own Inforad, e.g. a new crossing camera or some such will first be input to the web-site automatically, coming up with a set of map co-ordinates leaving the user to merely confirm the site. However, this is where the automation ends, as the user then has to transfer that data to a separate input sheet, there being no cross-fertilisation from one page to the next. A sadly missed opportunity in my book. If that wasn't 'horse-and-buggy' enough for you, there's no means of reporting a camera that's now gone at all, short of writing them an e-mail.

CONCLUSIONS

A good 'toy', and a sensible start to an upgrade to full satellite navigation, especially if you have the portable computer already - the output via its USB lead is fully NMEA-0183 v2.0 compatible (whatever that means), and it would then get its power from your laptop or PDA. It would be the computer that would need the cigar lighter!

Good hands-free operation makes it simple to operate, and more importantly, take heed of without taking your eyes off the road. It can be annoying if fitted whilst driving around your local area, where you know what you're doing anyway. I've plumped for the temporary (but nonetheless neater wiring job), so that I can fit it for long journeys, but maybe not bother with my urban crawl to work - after all, the chance to even get up to 30 would be a fine thing. I've also put a bit of Duck Tape over the tiny mesh grille of the bleeper, rather than silence it completely.

UPDATE: Having now lived with it for a year, well almost, I can now say that I wish it only warned me when I was going too fast - the bleeping would be so much more palatable if that was the only time it went off! West London is CRAWLING with Gatsos, 99% of which I am already aware of!

If they want this to be credible force for safer better-informed driving then it needs to be more trustworthy and to stop reporting cameras that have gone. The reporting of new camera location certainly needs to be automated - it's not everyone's cup of tea to cut and paste map co-ordinates from one screen to another.

It's possible that they do have some means of deleting road-work cameras after a certain period on an arbitrary basis, but whatever it is they use, it isn't quick enough to be of use. In my recent trip up the M6, I'd have had to add 10 datum points to my machine, try to remember why I'd done it on my return and then e-mail them to explain that these cameras are no longer there. No thanks!

UPDATE: Overall conclusion? It sounded like a great idea at the time, and for those that have to travel new paths frequently, could still be quite useful, especially with the £49 lifetime access to the database. However, for most of us that plod the same dreary streets day-in, day-out, constantly being warned of a danger that's been there for years is a pain in the butt, and if they can't even warn me of new ones quickly enough, not too much use either.
 

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