Garmin Nuvi Tricks & Tips

...your site. Learned a lot. Keep it up!!!

But, a sound bite on your first page is OK, but on subsequent pages can be irritating. Just saying

No matter what I choose to read about, all links take me to the top of the page. The #location in the link does not work with my browser.

All I can say is.. "You da man"!!

Nuvi1300WTGPS

Handy, but I hear what the others are saying. Some sound bites get old fast.

and no, I haven't been to the tips/tricks site in a while now. Good reminder to check it out.

I viewed the pages using IE, and everything works as it should now. Also works with Mozilla Firefox. Even the great little music bits play now.

Lots of good information and the sound bites were a good way to let me know that something had gone wrong with my plugin and I had to reinstall it. After that, I just hit the mute button.

Thanks for the information.

Was the one that got my attention. I can't believe the cities page would not include the road miles and would assume straight line mileage. I'm wondering if anyone has complained to Garmin about that as that's pretty useless info and most people (myself included) would never think to double check it and assume it was correct info.

Nice catch Gary!

As a long-time progammer, I can forgive them this. Calculating real road miles involves high level node-and-vector mathematics, and doing that for each entry on a list on one screen would take, perhaps, too much real-time.

Gary was not "catching" Garmin. That is the way that Garmin presents choices to you, whether or not they are cities, Crackerbarrels, Sears or whatever.

Try this yourself. Do a Where To and look for McDonalds. You will get a list of the 50 closest McDonalds. You likely know the approximate distances from your house to various McDonalds and you will find they are all "as the crow flies". That is the way it was designed. Would you really want the GPS to calculate a route to all 50 McDonalds before it showed you the list?

As David said, the programmers had to make a choice as to what to calculate and the distance between coordinates (which is what the GPS knows at that point) was the result.

I thought I knew it all, but I keep finding stuff on the Gayman website I didnt know I didnt know!

I see. I thought the unit ran the algorithm from where you are to the destination but I can see how that would take a lot of time. Maybe as processing speed improves in the future, this can become a more accurate estimation by eliminating a straight line calculation.

Thanks.

I see. I thought the unit ran the algorithm from where you are to the destination but I can see how that would take a lot of time. Maybe as processing speed improves in the future, this can become a more accurate estimation by eliminating a straight line calculation.

Thanks.

I was reading one of the guides on POIs on this forum and a link was included to your site. Between the two, mostly yours, I figured out how to make my first POIs. I've been back several times looking for more info. Thanks for your efforts. They are much appreciated.

Gary's site is an excellent source of information. However, I don't generally visit it for two reasons:

1. It's difficult to find anything unless I use Google and limit searches to his site.

2. It's an eyesore (and earsore). The design is straight out of the 90s.

Revamping the entire layout of the site so that the various tricks and tips are on individual pages will speed up the site since the viewer will not have to download a lot of information before trying to use the site. Introducing a search engine as part of the revisions would vastly improve the usability of the site. This assumes of course that a search engine feature hasn't already been implemented, and that Gary knows about CSS at the very least to revise his pages.

I agree the site has a tremendous amount of information but not an easy site to navigate or find what I want.

I concur with others the sounds are annoying.

I'd noticed that several distant locations I travel to were out of whack by approx 1/3 so just assumed it was crow fly. Weirdly the est. times are pretty good so wonder what number the algorithm is calculating from..

It seem no matter what someone does there is always some that will complain. Thanks to Gary there are plenty of tips and hints for people to learn how to use their GPS at no cost to them. This constant complaining has stop other people that provided good info to quit posting or leave the site. We should thank them and move one. (now everyone can unload on me and leave Gary alone for awhile)

Thanks for the tips!

Why? You're entitled to your opinion. I don't believe there to be anyone here who hasn't shown his or her gratitude to Gary for the information he provides. However, just because we appreciate the information provided doesn't mean we cannot provide constructive criticism on how to make the site even better.

I had this kind of discussion on another site (a small game company), and one of the people responding to the thread I started believed the status quo was "good enough". The status quo? A message board hosted on freeyabb with banners screaming "you won" every time the page changed. The person in question thought the status quo was "good enough" because he blocked the ads, when in reality it wasn't about him but the casual user who might not be using an ad blocker and thus be turned away from the games being sold because of loud and obnoxious banners.

Three weeks later the forums were moved to the company's server because of that thread.

The key phrase I used in the discussion there to get my point across was "it's not about us", because it isn't. It's about Mr. First-time-GPS-owner wanting to learn more about his device. If I were Mr. First-time-GPS-owner and visited Gary's site in its current state, I wouldn't go back and I probably would be telling ten of my friends of my bad experience there.

Couldn't have said it better myself!! Right on!

Just what I was looking for, Thanks for the info

without doubt the best Garmain site I've ever seen, but sometimes it's like taking a drink out of a firehose...so much info to take in...whew!!

In deed, I have not checked out what's new on your site for a while.

It's about time to know some new tricks and tips.

Tip and Trick site. Always learning something new.

Gary's webpage is just too good, so this thread should stay on the main page a little longer! I been spending hours on his pages, trying to remember all the numerous ticks and trips, printing out the more convoluted info!!

I became a GPS user a week ago with a new Garmin 2595LMT. I found his site from a link on a thread here. Between the info I found here, but mostly with his guide, I was able to create several tourguide POIs. I don't think I could have done it without his instructions though.

It's great for noob basic training, no doubt about that. He also talked about and linked to GeePeeEX. That tool looks amazing and appears to be the best way to create POIs but I haven't installed it yet.

Kudos to Gary!

You might want to try EPE for building poi's

I have a NUVI with traffic avoidance.
However sometimes I know it is better just to stick it out.
Once I pass the off-ramp to avoid the traffic, it recalculates and tell me to get off at the next exit of course, which I ignore.
The problem is how do I do which is my off-ramp or how do I turn of the traffic avoidance while driving?

I recently purchased a 2460LM, and a Traffic power cable. The first site I found with helps was Gary's site. Maybe I am different than most, but I am able to look beyond what some of you found irritating and get right into all of the great information. Gary provided a vast amount of information from his own experience, on his own time. I had opportunity to contact him directly and found him to be most helpful. Maybe one day some of us will take the time to give instead of take.

I was a Magellan user for several years and can say that I am happy to be part of Garmin. From my contacts with Garmin email support rates a C and voice an A. My contacts via email were with oops' with Garmin Express and trying to cut down on the learning curve. The only voice was because the Traffic car wouldn't show up. Was sent an email to supply additional information for diagnostics. However, after driving around for a longer period of time the car showed up. Works perfectly. Sometimes patience is really the answer.

Give Gary a break ... he gave us all a lot of information ... for FREE!

You do realize this thread has been dormant for 2 years, right?

Yes. But there is still a lot of info for those of us who are buying older, but still relevant models like the 2460. Gary's site was very informative and helpful for me.

It just kind of irritated me to see people being so critical of people who give of their free time to help others.

I agree. Gary's a great guy and I also am one of those that learned much about using my GPS when I first got it, by visiting his site. I haven't used it in some time, but after all this discussion, I think it's time to revisit.

The site may not be fancy, but I liken it to going to visit the guy down the street that go see to get some advice.

Gary, we miss you.

My family and I just returned from a cruise and I learned a few tricks while at sea.

Look forward to your suggestions.

Thank you for the helpful info!

Gary's site site is a wealth of info, especially for the new nuvi user. One should appreciate a site of this nature...I know I do.

I agree. Without the help of Turboccc and Gary Hayman, I would not have been able to enjoy many of the benefits of POI Factory. Both provided a wealth of information and enabled me to learn many, many new GPS and POI skills.

Now,if Gary would just come to Alabama and teach me zydeco dancing!!!