I had a Garmin handheld GPS (which was stolen) --- it would work with a
laptop but I didn't like the cumbersomeness (if that is indeed a word) of
the arrangement. And the display on the GPS unit itself was way too small
for my aging eyes.

My stepson recently bought a TomTom One for his car --- I've borrowed it a
number of times and I'm sold. They're about $250 Cdn --- nice big screen
that I can read while driving and a really good touchscreen interface that
is also usable while driving. Coverage and accuracy is good --- I have both
found and been navigated to some pretty obscure addresses and locations. And
it is sooo much more convenient than messing around with a laptop.

Don't know for sure about the backroads coverage but my experience with the
TomTom is that if you can find the road on a map it's going to be in the
TomTom. May not apply to the backroads of BC --- but worth checking into. My
experience with the logging/backroads of BC when I lived there is that I
could find them on a map and they had names/designations --- which suggests
to me that they'd be in the TomTom. YMMV of course...........

Cheers,
Doug
Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

On 1/15/08, Loren Busch <starwagen@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm glad to hear that Delorme has improved the coverage in Canada.  The
> issue Dave was trying to address is coverage in more remote areas,
> specifically he was asking about the interior of BC.  Here in the States I
> didn't have any complaints about the coverage on the Delorme.  But on a
> trip
> two years ago I ran the laptop most every day for three weeks.  I
> alternated
> between Streets & Trips and Delorme software.  And I'll stick to my
> opinion
> that the Delorme software sucks, a really bad user interface for any
> searching or planning.  I found it very frustrating and ended up using
> only
> Streets & Trips for the last week of the trip. But, given that, I found
> both
> very poor for use in town.  Both got lost and gave wrong directions when
> driving in traffic if the signal was lost for a few seconds.  If you
> pulled
> up to a stop light neither could figure out what direction you were going
> when standing still and started providing directions that were all wrong.
> In a severe test, getting to a friends place in Kennsington, Ca. (next to
> Berkley) I'd still be driving in circles if I hadn't known where I was
> going.  Summing up so far, unless you have a second person on board to act
> as navigator the laptop based systems fall far short.  Dedicated units
> meant
> for use in vehicles seem to be a much better solution.  BUT, those tend to
> lack the detailed coverage in the boonies, are set up for urban
> navigation.
> BTW, to any reading this, I'm all ears for any better solutions that have
> been found.  My experience is limited at this point.
>
> On Jan 15, 2008 11:48 AM, Mike Collum <collum@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > I don't know what year the DeLorme software you tried was from but the
> > 2008 version has greatly increased Canadian coverage.  I used the 2008
> > Street Atlas Plus and even the small streets (and phone numbers) in
> > Almonte as well as Head of St. Margaret's Bay and Halifax were shown.
> > Apparently, all of Canada is shown that way but those places are where I
> > really used it.  The version I had before that only showed "most" of
> > Canada's main highways.
> >
> >
>

--
http://www.dougalcock.com