GPS WITH CAPABILITY TO FIND RV PARKS

If you have a smart phone you may want to look at rvparky.com

I bought a Garmin RV-760-LMT not long ago. It will find RV Parks near where you're located, along your route, near a specified location, etc.

I've not used it enough to judge how well it works. "Along the designated route" may start with the RV Parks that are closest to your present location and follow your route to the ones more distant, so you may need to scroll to find one 300 miles down the road.

Someone with more experience with this GPS will probably pitch in soon.

Wayne

Great buy on Rand

Bought this one a few weeks ago after breaking the one I had. It will do exactly as you want and much more. If you want to take a break along the route or find a fuel station it only take a couple of clicks and up they come. The gps has information on the camp grounds such as ratings, phone numbers, and amenities.

When we get home from this trip I will repair my old one.

Along our route with the broken one it was very difficult to tell the towing service where we were located. If the Rand had not been dropped and broken I could have punched one line and told the tow company exactly where I was at.

Yes it has warts and faults like any gps. It will take you the wrong way on occassion but you should always cross reference your route if you are driving a 40 footer with a toad. U turns are not fun.,

Checkout the GS RV7735LM. Received ours a month ago. Great little unit. Got ours at Camping World. Has done everything they said it would. Plus the 7 inch screen is super.

I've used both TomTom and Garmin but have a lot more experience with Garmin. With both you can install files call Points-of-Interest (POI) and there are a number of places on the Internet where you can find these files containing camping information. The RV group called Discovery Owners has a very extensive list of these types of files for almost every kind of GPS.

However, one problem with this is that RV campgrounds that are not part of some collective like Good Sam may not be included in any POI files. The POI files generally encompass a set of similar locations like all Walmarts, or all Good Sam parks, State Parks, etc. So using the GPS databases is far from perfect.

As others have said, there are phone applications which can be just as good. RV Parky and AllStays are two of the more popular ones. RV Parky contains park information that is user contributed, so if you use it and find a park not listed or want to provide more information on a park, just submit the data. Because of this it doesn't contain nearly as many parks as AllStays, but the really nice thing is it doesn't require a phone connection to use. AllStays has a much larger database of parks and such, but it requires a working phone connection to use it.

So if you have a good cell connection then AllStays is the one to use. If you have no cell connection and don't have a GPS with POIs then your best option would be RV Parky.

I use an older Rand RM7720 and upgrade the maps and POI,s about 3 times per year. Its great for finding camp grounds, rest areas and fuel. I think the new 7735 has a faster processor. It will do exactly what you need.

bigred1cav wrote:
I am interested in a GPS that will take the work out of travel I would like to have a program that after each 300 miles shows me the nearby RV overnight parks. I just want to tell it 300 miles from here I want to spend the night and the software give me choices. Thanks

I do all of my route planning on a computer (there's another thread on that topic), so I my experience with route planning on a GPS is limited. However, all of the Garmin GPS models that I've used have a feature to find Lodging/Campgrounds with the option to select near Here/City, where you then enter the destination. As noted above, though, Garmin's campground database isn't as extensive as you might want and, in any event, you'll probably want to know more about the campground than the mere fact of its existence. For that reason, it might be better to do a little research using one of the app-based applications, or online via http://www.rvparkreviews.com, or even Google maps, find a campground that meets your expectations, and then enter that specific campground into the GPS. I believe all GPS's can do that.

And, once the destination is entered, remember an important aspect of using any GPS:

I also use rvparky for advance planning. I pick a location near the 300 mile point and it will tell me exact distance to that point and suggested all kinds of places to stay (Walmarts, trcuk stops, rest areas, and campgrounds). And it has ratings. Non of my GPS's have ratings and I think a rating reviews is not good.

Many GPS units, both those designed for RV use and those that aren't, will show you RV parks nearby or at your destination city.

Let's deviate slightly... there is a subscription computer service that I use when planning our trips. The service is called RV Trip Wizard. You can try it before subscribing to it... It allows you to set a set of "distance rings" which are concentric from your last specified location and you specify the distance on each ring (I have mine set at 200, 250 and 300 miles). You can find it here:

RV Trip Wizard

Once you get the hang of it, it's a REALLY useful tool!!