[OAC_Sparky]

NefCanuck,Sep 24 2005, 01:16 AM Wrote:Gonna hit a local Canadian Tire or two this weekend to see what the skinny is on this thing.  I'm curious to see what the warranty is like on the thing for example.

The Garmin systems look okay but at 128MB storage I'm not sure they'll be up to the task of providing street level Canadian coverage and does "audible promt" mean a "turn left or turn right" command or just a beep?  I'd much rather have the turn left & turn right prompt than a beep.

NefCanuck
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I have a programmable Garmin 64Mb Chip that right now has all of Ontario from North Bay south, the Northern states around Lake Erie (Michigan, Ohio, NY), about 150 miles in from the shore. That's street level data, give me your address I can tell you the phone number of your closest convenience store.

I have a Garmin 196 that I bought new, WAAS-anabled unit that's an aviation/auto/marine unit. I actually bought it for flying, on top of the street data on a reprogrammable chip, it has all of the airport, obstacle and terrain data for North America.

The only drawback is that it's monochrome; the colour ones at the time sucked batteries like no tomorrow (4 AAs in 4-5 hours, mine will go 16 on 4 AAs), and the last thing you want is to have to change batteries in-flight if you can avoid it.



Most of the "audible" prompts now are voice; that said, I find voice prompts annoying -- a beep with a big arrow on the screen is good enough rather than a canned voice nagging you.