Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack
All, this has drifted way off track and should have stopped many messages ago. I really hate having to jump in here but I've been getting well-justified private complaints. Can we *please* try to keep things on topic??? John J. Forster said the following on 01/01/2011 12:14 AM: HNY, I disagree. The reason a high performance GPS costs 100K or more is that the engineering cost is ammortized over a few hundred units. Say the thing cost $10M to develop and you make 1000, that's $10,000 NRE per unit. However, if you have a successful commercial unit and sell 1,000,000 the NRE is $10. I'd doubt any of the hand held GPS units costs even $50 in million quantities. Ditto with the SW. The errors I've seen are map, not position, errors. YMMV, -John == Hi, first, a happy and hopefully healthy New Year to all of you. I think, some of you are going slightly overboard, in what you expect a $150 Dollar car navigator should do, I also don't believe some of you you realise what exactly it was designed to do. It is not a device to accurately shoot a missile trough somebodies toilet window and hit a specified turd in the bowl. It is designed to get you relatively easy and close to a specified designation. preferably when used in a motor car This it does perfectly well. It may be a few meters out from an exact house number, but it got you there without you having to look at the map, (or worse get your spouse to read the map and navigate you). It improves the road safety, especially at night time, when you often don't see the street names and have to slow down to a crawl with a lot of cars bunched up behind you. The mind boggles if some of you think because the GPS is not 100% accurate, The Fire brigade gets either lost, or tries to extinguish the house next door to the burning one, just because the GPS is 30m out. What you're actually are saying is: The Fire brigade is full of idiots. To sell an item for 150 or so Bucks, on can not reasonably expect it to be as perfect than another item which sells for 100 grand or more and nobody except a few government institutions can afford it. Not every instrument is mad by Agilent for a cost which is prohibitive to the normal punter. Just get back down to earth, a few years ago you had to learn how to read a map, or follow the often useless instructions somebody else gave you. Now for hardly any money, you get to your destination with least amount of effort and a lot saver than before. Regards, Horst gonzo- A GPS is a precision device. A Navigator is a consumer device. To confuse the two is to fail to understand either. A navigator IS a GPS. Surveying GPSs may use carrier phase tracking or whatever to get about 2mm accuracy. Just because it is optimized for navigation instead of location accuracy and gets about 3m accuracy doesn't mean that a navigator isn't a GPS. Note that map accuracy has nothing to do with GPS receiver accuracy. Also some mapping data has built in errors or incorrect POIs to identify the data in case it is copied. For instance, one company's street mapping software I owned had, in the small town I live in, a POI that said: * Institute Of Technology even though there has never been a school there and it was a actually closed gas station. -Arthur ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack
Happy New Year every one. It is not the GPS, it is clearly the database, and short of a detailed survey of every address there will be variations. As Google enhances it's database I am sure so will the Navigator sellers. We have come a long way and we are getting spoiled. Bert Kehren Miami In a message dated 1/1/2011 12:05:27 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, hor...@iinet.net.au writes: Hi, first, a happy and hopefully healthy New Year to all of you. I think, some of you are going slightly overboard, in what you expect a $150 Dollar car navigator should do, I also don't believe some of you you realise what exactly it was designed to do. It is not a device to accurately shoot a missile trough somebodies toilet window and hit a specified turd in the bowl. It is designed to get you relatively easy and close to a specified designation. preferably when used in a motor car This it does perfectly well. It may be a few meters out from an exact house number, but it got you there without you having to look at the map, (or worse get your spouse to read the map and navigate you). It improves the road safety, especially at night time, when you often don't see the street names and have to slow down to a crawl with a lot of cars bunched up behind you. The mind boggles if some of you think because the GPS is not 100% accurate, The Fire brigade gets either lost, or tries to extinguish the house next door to the burning one, just because the GPS is 30m out. What you're actually are saying is: The Fire brigade is full of idiots. To sell an item for 150 or so Bucks, on can not reasonably expect it to be as perfect than another item which sells for 100 grand or more and nobody except a few government institutions can afford it. Not every instrument is mad by Agilent for a cost which is prohibitive to the normal punter. Just get back down to earth, a few years ago you had to learn how to read a map, or follow the often useless instructions somebody else gave you. Now for hardly any money, you get to your destination with least amount of effort and a lot saver than before. Regards, Horst gonzo- A GPS is a precision device. A Navigator is a consumer device. To confuse the two is to fail to understand either. A navigator IS a GPS. Surveying GPSs may use carrier phase tracking or whatever to get about 2mm accuracy. Just because it is optimized for navigation instead of location accuracy and gets about 3m accuracy doesn't mean that a navigator isn't a GPS. Note that map accuracy has nothing to do with GPS receiver accuracy. Also some mapping data has built in errors or incorrect POIs to identify the data in case it is copied. For instance, one company's street mapping software I owned had, in the small town I live in, a POI that said: * Institute Of Technology even though there has never been a school there and it was a actually closed gas station. -Arthur ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack
Dick wrote: Most of the destinations I program in, by address, work well. Most of the time, I get led right to the door. So why can't it figure out where I live ?? As others have pointed out, roads have generally been surveyed pretty accurately but houses have not, except in heavily populated areas. Business districts tend to be more densely built up than residential areas, so they are more likely to have been surveyed accurately. I have lived in close-in suburbs of major metro areas ever since GPS receivers became everyday consumer items, and addresses near me have always been spot on. But get out into rural areas, and they may or may not be. The amount of work necessary to survey every address on every road in a country the size of the US is simply too great to be commercially worthwhile -- and that is before you consider the fact that the addresses many locals know are not the official addresses assigned by the county/town/village. My grandparents lived and died never knowing that their house was on 60th St. West in their small town (where the longest street was about 10 blocks). Just sloppy work, pure and simple. Not sloppy, just not completely done because it's not commercially worthwhile. Anyone who disagrees is free to do the survey himself and market better, more accurate GPS navigation devices. Best regards, Charles ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack
Thank you, Horst, for your voice of calm reason. The point that I raised (or tried to...) was that no data base of this size is capable of being error free, whether the unit cost of production is ten billion dollars or ten cents. Random error can be reduced but it can never be eliminated. Worse, we can never know for certain how much exists. cf. any first year statistics text. Process engineers--and I'm sure that Garmin has many--devote their careers to reducing error, both systematic and stochastic. By the time a map product gets to market, most of the systematic error will have been removed. More in the $100K maps and less in the $100 maps. It is not nearly as simple as the cost-per-unit-production model that John posits. I'm sure he realizes that quite well and was simply trying to make his point. But here's the hitch: No matter how hard those eager men and women work at it, they will never remove all the stochastic error, partly because, as I noted, they don't know how much is there. Because stochastic error is random, the errors form a gaussian distribution with a mean of zero. This enables us to *estimate* the error and make allowances for it, but not to eliminate it. Would that we could... Precision, in process control, is often defined as the standard deviation of the stochastic error distribution. That, too, can be improved but never made perfect. So...when people rant about error resulting from shoddy workmanship or lack of caring...well, maybe. But no matter how careful the workmanship or how dedicated the craftsmen, the work will not be error free. If that error lands in the lap of your GPS as you seek the nearest Walgreens, you simply have fallen prey to what one of my old profs called Tuvshitzki's Theorem. Horst's point is equally valid. Garmin sells it because for the vast majority of users, it is plenty good enough and making it better winds you up on the wrong side of the diminishing returns curve. That's the Capitalist Way. Don't look at me, I'm not a capitalist. The world runs on Garmin gear and Navteq maps. Much of the DoD relies on Garmin gear and Navteq maps. But if they aren't good enough for some of you gentlemen, the answer is simple: Don't use them. On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 12:04 AM, Horst Schmidt hor...@iinet.net.au wrote: Hi, first, a happy and hopefully healthy New Year to all of you. I think, some of you are going slightly overboard, in what you expect a $150 Dollar car navigator should do, I also don't believe some of you you realise what exactly it was designed to do. It is not a device to accurately shoot a missile trough somebodies toilet window and hit a specified turd in the bowl. It is designed to get you relatively easy and close to a specified designation. preferably when used in a motor car This it does perfectly well. It may be a few meters out from an exact house number, but it got you there without you having to look at the map, (or worse get your spouse to read the map and navigate you). It improves the road safety, especially at night time, when you often don't see the street names and have to slow down to a crawl with a lot of cars bunched up behind you. The mind boggles if some of you think because the GPS is not 100% accurate, The Fire brigade gets either lost, or tries to extinguish the house next door to the burning one, just because the GPS is 30m out. What you're actually are saying is: The Fire brigade is full of idiots. To sell an item for 150 or so Bucks, on can not reasonably expect it to be as perfect than another item which sells for 100 grand or more and nobody except a few government institutions can afford it. Not every instrument is mad by Agilent for a cost which is prohibitive to the normal punter. Just get back down to earth, a few years ago you had to learn how to read a map, or follow the often useless instructions somebody else gave you. Now for hardly any money, you get to your destination with least amount of effort and a lot saver than before. Regards, Horst gonzo- A GPS is a precision device. A Navigator is a consumer device. To confuse the two is to fail to understand either. A navigator IS a GPS. Surveying GPSs may use carrier phase tracking or whatever to get about 2mm accuracy. Just because it is optimized for navigation instead of location accuracy and gets about 3m accuracy doesn't mean that a navigator isn't a GPS. Note that map accuracy has nothing to do with GPS receiver accuracy. Also some mapping data has built in errors or incorrect POIs to identify the data in case it is copied. For instance, one company's street mapping software I owned had, in the small town I live in, a POI that said: * Institute Of Technology even though there has never been a school there and it was a actually closed gas station. -Arthur ___
Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack
You are correct, John, and I apologize for my verbosity on the topic. Others may have the last word, if desired, I'm done. Bill On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 8:48 AM, John Ackermann N8UR j...@febo.com wrote: All, this has drifted way off track and should have stopped many messages ago. I really hate having to jump in here but I've been getting well-justified private complaints. Can we *please* try to keep things on topic??? John J. Forster said the following on 01/01/2011 12:14 AM: HNY, I disagree. The reason a high performance GPS costs 100K or more is that the engineering cost is ammortized over a few hundred units. Say the thing cost $10M to develop and you make 1000, that's $10,000 NRE per unit. However, if you have a successful commercial unit and sell 1,000,000 the NRE is $10. I'd doubt any of the hand held GPS units costs even $50 in million quantities. Ditto with the SW. The errors I've seen are map, not position, errors. YMMV, -John == Hi, first, a happy and hopefully healthy New Year to all of you. I think, some of you are going slightly overboard, in what you expect a $150 Dollar car navigator should do, I also don't believe some of you you realise what exactly it was designed to do. It is not a device to accurately shoot a missile trough somebodies toilet window and hit a specified turd in the bowl. It is designed to get you relatively easy and close to a specified designation. preferably when used in a motor car This it does perfectly well. It may be a few meters out from an exact house number, but it got you there without you having to look at the map, (or worse get your spouse to read the map and navigate you). It improves the road safety, especially at night time, when you often don't see the street names and have to slow down to a crawl with a lot of cars bunched up behind you. The mind boggles if some of you think because the GPS is not 100% accurate, The Fire brigade gets either lost, or tries to extinguish the house next door to the burning one, just because the GPS is 30m out. What you're actually are saying is: The Fire brigade is full of idiots. To sell an item for 150 or so Bucks, on can not reasonably expect it to be as perfect than another item which sells for 100 grand or more and nobody except a few government institutions can afford it. Not every instrument is mad by Agilent for a cost which is prohibitive to the normal punter. Just get back down to earth, a few years ago you had to learn how to read a map, or follow the often useless instructions somebody else gave you. Now for hardly any money, you get to your destination with least amount of effort and a lot saver than before. Regards, Horst gonzo- A GPS is a precision device. A Navigator is a consumer device. To confuse the two is to fail to understand either. A navigator IS a GPS. Surveying GPSs may use carrier phase tracking or whatever to get about 2mm accuracy. Just because it is optimized for navigation instead of location accuracy and gets about 3m accuracy doesn't mean that a navigator isn't a GPS. Note that map accuracy has nothing to do with GPS receiver accuracy. Also some mapping data has built in errors or incorrect POIs to identify the data in case it is copied. For instance, one company's street mapping software I owned had, in the small town I live in, a POI that said: * Institute Of Technology even though there has never been a school there and it was a actually closed gas station. -Arthur ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack
My 0.02 These SAME maps are being used in E911 and other GIS systems so the poor workmanship which is so obvious here has the potential to put lives in danger. Most of the emergency response trucks up here have GPS systems with these maps onboard - not a problem for locals but if we needed outside assistance all bets are off. The current 'good enough' culture is extremely destructive and I'd like to see a return to traditional values. As in test gear which lasts and can be repaired and upgraded not trash which ends up in a landfill in 3 years. Scott Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry -Original Message- From: J. Forster j...@quik.com Sender: time-nuts-boun...@febo.com Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2010 09:49:32 To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurementtime-nuts@febo.com Reply-To: j...@quik.com, Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement time-nuts@febo.com Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them a little slack Well, I won't rant back at you, Dick, but your expectations are way off base. GPS cartographers have to designate billions (yes, billions) of addresses and the fact that they miss a few scarcely justifies a backhand brushoff as shoddy work. Look at it another way: They are producing one product for 10s of millions of customers. The reproduction costs are trivial, so they have hundreds of millions of dollars to get one product right! Can you have a product of this size and complexity that is completely error free. No. No matter how hard you try, the answer remains...no. (References on stochastic processes available on request.) Can you have a product with* fewer* errors? Of course. Can you have it for eighty bucks. Nope. The $80 is for one copy. Try near a $1,000,000,000 for the digital map of the USA. Be a good capitalist and take your choice. -John = ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack
A GPS is a precision device. A Navigator is a consumer device. To confuse the two is to fail to understand either. ian ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
[time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack
gonzo- A GPS is a precision device. A Navigator is a consumer device. To confuse the two is to fail to understand either. A navigator IS a GPS. Surveying GPSs may use carrier phase tracking or whatever to get about 2mm accuracy. Just because it is optimized for navigation instead of location accuracy and gets about 3m accuracy doesn't mean that a navigator isn't a GPS. Note that map accuracy has nothing to do with GPS receiver accuracy. Also some mapping data has built in errors or incorrect POIs to identify the data in case it is copied. For instance, one company's street mapping software I owned had, in the small town I live in, a POI that said: * Institute Of Technology even though there has never been a school there and it was a actually closed gas station. -Arthur ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack
Hi, first, a happy and hopefully healthy New Year to all of you. I think, some of you are going slightly overboard, in what you expect a $150 Dollar car navigator should do, I also don't believe some of you you realise what exactly it was designed to do. It is not a device to accurately shoot a missile trough somebodies toilet window and hit a specified turd in the bowl. It is designed to get you relatively easy and close to a specified designation. preferably when used in a motor car This it does perfectly well. It may be a few meters out from an exact house number, but it got you there without you having to look at the map, (or worse get your spouse to read the map and navigate you). It improves the road safety, especially at night time, when you often don't see the street names and have to slow down to a crawl with a lot of cars bunched up behind you. The mind boggles if some of you think because the GPS is not 100% accurate, The Fire brigade gets either lost, or tries to extinguish the house next door to the burning one, just because the GPS is 30m out. What you're actually are saying is: The Fire brigade is full of idiots. To sell an item for 150 or so Bucks, on can not reasonably expect it to be as perfect than another item which sells for 100 grand or more and nobody except a few government institutions can afford it. Not every instrument is mad by Agilent for a cost which is prohibitive to the normal punter. Just get back down to earth, a few years ago you had to learn how to read a map, or follow the often useless instructions somebody else gave you. Now for hardly any money, you get to your destination with least amount of effort and a lot saver than before. Regards, Horst gonzo- A GPS is a precision device. A Navigator is a consumer device. To confuse the two is to fail to understand either. A navigator IS a GPS. Surveying GPSs may use carrier phase tracking or whatever to get about 2mm accuracy. Just because it is optimized for navigation instead of location accuracy and gets about 3m accuracy doesn't mean that a navigator isn't a GPS. Note that map accuracy has nothing to do with GPS receiver accuracy. Also some mapping data has built in errors or incorrect POIs to identify the data in case it is copied. For instance, one company's street mapping software I owned had, in the small town I live in, a POI that said: * Institute Of Technology even though there has never been a school there and it was a actually closed gas station. -Arthur ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack
I add just one more comment ... Most of the destinations I program in, by address, work well. Most of the time, I get led right to the door. So why can't it figure out where I live ?? Just sloppy work, pure and simple. 73, Dick, W1KSZ -Original Message- From: Horst Schmidt hor...@iinet.net.au Sent: Dec 31, 2010 10:04 PM To: time-nuts@febo.com Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack Hi, first, a happy and hopefully healthy New Year to all of you. I think, some of you are going slightly overboard, in what you expect a $150 Dollar car navigator should do, I also don't believe some of you you realise what exactly it was designed to do. It is not a device to accurately shoot a missile trough somebodies toilet window and hit a specified turd in the bowl. It is designed to get you relatively easy and close to a specified designation. preferably when used in a motor car This it does perfectly well. It may be a few meters out from an exact house number, but it got you there without you having to look at the map, (or worse get your spouse to read the map and navigate you). It improves the road safety, especially at night time, when you often don't see the street names and have to slow down to a crawl with a lot of cars bunched up behind you. The mind boggles if some of you think because the GPS is not 100% accurate, The Fire brigade gets either lost, or tries to extinguish the house next door to the burning one, just because the GPS is 30m out. What you're actually are saying is: The Fire brigade is full of idiots. To sell an item for 150 or so Bucks, on can not reasonably expect it to be as perfect than another item which sells for 100 grand or more and nobody except a few government institutions can afford it. Not every instrument is mad by Agilent for a cost which is prohibitive to the normal punter. Just get back down to earth, a few years ago you had to learn how to read a map, or follow the often useless instructions somebody else gave you. Now for hardly any money, you get to your destination with least amount of effort and a lot saver than before. Regards, Horst gonzo- A GPS is a precision device. A Navigator is a consumer device. To confuse the two is to fail to understand either. A navigator IS a GPS. Surveying GPSs may use carrier phase tracking or whatever to get about 2mm accuracy. Just because it is optimized for navigation instead of location accuracy and gets about 3m accuracy doesn't mean that a navigator isn't a GPS. Note that map accuracy has nothing to do with GPS receiver accuracy. Also some mapping data has built in errors or incorrect POIs to identify the data in case it is copied. For instance, one company's street mapping software I owned had, in the small town I live in, a POI that said: * Institute Of Technology even though there has never been a school there and it was a actually closed gas station. -Arthur ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack
HNY, I disagree. The reason a high performance GPS costs 100K or more is that the engineering cost is ammortized over a few hundred units. Say the thing cost $10M to develop and you make 1000, that's $10,000 NRE per unit. However, if you have a successful commercial unit and sell 1,000,000 the NRE is $10. I'd doubt any of the hand held GPS units costs even $50 in million quantities. Ditto with the SW. The errors I've seen are map, not position, errors. YMMV, -John == Hi, first, a happy and hopefully healthy New Year to all of you. I think, some of you are going slightly overboard, in what you expect a $150 Dollar car navigator should do, I also don't believe some of you you realise what exactly it was designed to do. It is not a device to accurately shoot a missile trough somebodies toilet window and hit a specified turd in the bowl. It is designed to get you relatively easy and close to a specified designation. preferably when used in a motor car This it does perfectly well. It may be a few meters out from an exact house number, but it got you there without you having to look at the map, (or worse get your spouse to read the map and navigate you). It improves the road safety, especially at night time, when you often don't see the street names and have to slow down to a crawl with a lot of cars bunched up behind you. The mind boggles if some of you think because the GPS is not 100% accurate, The Fire brigade gets either lost, or tries to extinguish the house next door to the burning one, just because the GPS is 30m out. What you're actually are saying is: The Fire brigade is full of idiots. To sell an item for 150 or so Bucks, on can not reasonably expect it to be as perfect than another item which sells for 100 grand or more and nobody except a few government institutions can afford it. Not every instrument is mad by Agilent for a cost which is prohibitive to the normal punter. Just get back down to earth, a few years ago you had to learn how to read a map, or follow the often useless instructions somebody else gave you. Now for hardly any money, you get to your destination with least amount of effort and a lot saver than before. Regards, Horst gonzo- A GPS is a precision device. A Navigator is a consumer device. To confuse the two is to fail to understand either. A navigator IS a GPS. Surveying GPSs may use carrier phase tracking or whatever to get about 2mm accuracy. Just because it is optimized for navigation instead of location accuracy and gets about 3m accuracy doesn't mean that a navigator isn't a GPS. Note that map accuracy has nothing to do with GPS receiver accuracy. Also some mapping data has built in errors or incorrect POIs to identify the data in case it is copied. For instance, one company's street mapping software I owned had, in the small town I live in, a POI that said: * Institute Of Technology even though there has never been a school there and it was a actually closed gas station. -Arthur ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack
Well Richard. maybe we should all go back to the horse and buggy days. The horse even found its way bak when the driver had a skin full and was not to sure where he lived. Regards, Horst (e) On 1/01/2011 16:08, Richard W. Solomon wrote: I add just one more comment ... Most of the destinations I program in, by address, work well. Most of the time, I get led right to the door. So why can't it figure out where I live ?? Just sloppy work, pure and simple. 73, Dick, W1KSZ -Original Message- From: Horst Schmidthor...@iinet.net.au Sent: Dec 31, 2010 10:04 PM To: time-nuts@febo.com Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack Hi, first, a happy and hopefully healthy New Year to all of you. I think, some of you are going slightly overboard, in what you expect a $150 Dollar car navigator should do, I also don't believe some of you you realise what exactly it was designed to do. It is not a device to accurately shoot a missile trough somebodies toilet window and hit a specified turd in the bowl. It is designed to get you relatively easy and close to a specified designation. preferably when used in a motor car This it does perfectly well. It may be a few meters out from an exact house number, but it got you there without you having to look at the map, (or worse get your spouse to read the map and navigate you). It improves the road safety, especially at night time, when you often don't see the street names and have to slow down to a crawl with a lot of cars bunched up behind you. The mind boggles if some of you think because the GPS is not 100% accurate, The Fire brigade gets either lost, or tries to extinguish the house next door to the burning one, just because the GPS is 30m out. What you're actually are saying is: The Fire brigade is full of idiots. To sell an item for 150 or so Bucks, on can not reasonably expect it to be as perfect than another item which sells for 100 grand or more and nobody except a few government institutions can afford it. Not every instrument is mad by Agilent for a cost which is prohibitive to the normal punter. Just get back down to earth, a few years ago you had to learn how to read a map, or follow the often useless instructions somebody else gave you. Now for hardly any money, you get to your destination with least amount of effort and a lot saver than before. Regards, Horst gonzo- A GPS is a precision device. A Navigator is a consumer device. To confuse the two is to fail to understand either. A navigator IS a GPS. Surveying GPSs may use carrier phase tracking or whatever to get about 2mm accuracy. Just because it is optimized for navigation instead of location accuracy and gets about 3m accuracy doesn't mean that a navigator isn't a GPS. Note that map accuracy has nothing to do with GPS receiver accuracy. Also some mapping data has built in errors or incorrect POIs to identify the data in case it is copied. For instance, one company's street mapping software I owned had, in the small town I live in, a POI that said: * Institute Of Technology even though there has never been a school there and it was a actually closed gas station. -Arthur ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there. ___ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
