Portable Sat Nav

[JJRS4]

Has anyone got any recommendations on a good portable SatNav system. Must have Europe access too.

[johneroberts]

Jeremy,
i use the Garmin Road Pilot III @£900 plus europe access £140 with 128mb card, cant fault it brilliant, i know Maplins have been selling the package for about £800 recently.
Cheers
jr

[JohnH]

I have recently bought the Navman iC630 which in effect competes with the garmin. Slightly smaller with in-built speaker and aerial so only need power lead into lighter socket. Cannot be used without power though unlike the Garmin. Paid about £750 for it on eBay and very pleased with its performance so far. The unit comes with 64Mb internally and you can add up to 256Mb of SD-RAM via a socket which will allow you to load all of UK plus quite a bit of mainland Europe.

[TimJMS]

Getting really hacked off with my Ipaq / Navman unit these days, and can no longer recommend it.

The windscreen suction mount that came supplied with the Navman was pathetic, and damage was occurring to the socket that connects directly onto the motherboard because the unit kept falling from the windscreen, so I ended up sourcing a much heavier duty item to do the job from elsewhere, with good clamps for the cable.

Absolutely has to be coupled into the power all the time if you want to see the info displayed with the backlight.

Increasingly the battery discharges if not used for say a week or so, and every time that happens you have to go through the ball ache of reloading ALL software packages back into the damned thing from a laptop or PC

Unless they have improved things dramatically since I bought mine (approx 18 months ago) then I cant in good conscience recommend one of these.

Keep hearing good things about the Garmin though [img]images/graemlins/nodder.gif[/img]

[JohnH]

This place has some good reviews of Portable Sat nav kit http://www.pocketgps.co.uk/