Streets & Trips Replacement

I have use just about everything and Streets and Tips were the very best for me along with Google Maps. Cheers and Grins all around

Belgique wrote:
agesilaus: I'm tempted on the 890 but my experience with Garmin is that it is fine if you take Interstates but comes up with strange routes if you prefer old US highways like US2 or US 301. I know you can tell it to avoid interstates but it is binary and won't put you on one even when it is clearly the only real option. S&T used a sliding like/dislike scale for different classes of roads and was better at sensible routes.

Any experience with this on your 890? Many thanks.

So far no strange routing, but it has the option to tell it that you are driving an RV and to set the length and weight parameters for that RV. It then takes very conservative routes. Which is OK but if you drop the TT and are driving your truck don't forget to set the mode to automobile or you will find it taking you on those conservative routes. Way out of the optimal path for a truck.
SA would run us down very strange routes in towns, zigzagging around the city grid. We would find us driving down decayed asphalt roads past houses that had seen their best times decades ago. With folks looking in surprise at the truck and RV cruising by their houses.
The 890 does not do that it takes you down the optimal route and will use secondary roads. And the CG database now includes some boondocking spots on BLM and FS land. We had no problem with it finding our current spot on a Forest Road outside the South Rim.
They have greatly improved the route finding algorithm and in 4500 miles so far it has not lead us astray once.
We have seen that behavior on older systems, one took us up the Moki Dugway pulling a popup, and on another occasion one took us down a goat path in New Mexico. Using 'shortest route' setting was very problematic.
The 890 does occasionally become a bit confused, telling us we were on a dirt road when we were on the paved AZ Hwy 64. But that was harmless so far.
I'm going to sit down an produce a review of the RV890 soon and I'll post it here. But I'm sure that just like any large software product there are some nasty glitches hidden in it somewhere. You always need to be aware of your actual physical location and never blindly follow the GPS system.

I used Delorme SA on my laptop for many years till Garmin bought the company and immediately ditched SA. I still use the last version, 2015, for mainly the POI's which can be imported into it.

SA had the option to log your trip data, which you can rerun later to see the exact route, speed, etc you took.I have MANY (most) trips logged to review at a later time.

For navigation, I use Co-Pilot on my tablet.

agesilaus: I'm tempted on the 890 but my experience with Garmin is that it is fine if you take Interstates but comes up with strange routes if you prefer old US highways like US2 or US 301. I know you can tell it to avoid interstates but it is binary and won't put you on one even when it is clearly the only real option. S&T used a sliding like/dislike scale for different classes of roads and was better at sensible routes.

Any experience with this on your 890? Many thanks.

Randy,

You and I are in the same situation. I traded between S&T and SA regularly and finally settled in with SA because it was the last one on sale.

Google Maps can layout a path, but as it web app, changes underway require that you find wire (old term for getting internet access). For us this was a complete stopper until we put a repeater in the coach and even then, if there is no signal, there is nothing to work with....

They say that you can down load the charts (maps) in advance, but that assumes that you know where you are going and we often are not at all sure. GM also will not follow your onboard GPS. This makes it more or less useless as an enroute navigator.

I really liked the way it could be updated enroute, and when you stopped for fuel or the overnight at a different than planned time, the change would wrinkle trough the entire plan.

Someone told me that CoPilot can do most of this, but I have not had the time to learn enough of it to say that for a fact.

Matt

We used S&T and Street Atlas software as long as we could mainly SA at the end. The software apps were causing us to get off-route at least once or twice a day. And finding a place to turn around when you are pulling a 30 ft trailer isn't that simple. I estimate they were costing us at least 30 to 45 minutes a day.

I did an extensive search for a replacement. There are none to be found for real time navigation in my opinion. Google maps just does not fill the need. I use RV Trip Wizard for trip planning and it is very capable but it's real time mode is primitive. So I finally broke down and bout an expensive Garmin RV890. The software apps were causing us to get off-route at least once or twice a day. And sending use down inappropriate streets in towns.
For real time nav the 890 is very good with a few glitches in our 4500 miles of use so far. For trip planning it mostly stinks. Thus RVTW which cannot be beat. So the replacement is much more expensive, I got the 890 for $390 and RVTW is $40/yr but my blood pressure has been cut by a fair amount. The Garmin has a lot of other features, it tells you the speed limit, it warns of curves and grades ahead, tells you what the next cross street is and a lot more.

Thanks dkilley!! I didn't notice the line feature.

Try “My Google Maps”.