P c miler 450

Well,...... I had one (450). Key word is had. I wasn't very impressed. It seemed to navigate all right but some of the features I didn't like. It has a setting to notify you where the truck stops are located and fuel is there. In other words it would show up a a gas station emblem on your screen. Where there were truck stop gas stations I didn't see the emblem. It also has a selection that shows truck services. That show a different emblem but the problem I saw is the emblem showed up at every on and off ramp. But there were no services or anything at all at that location. Nothing but sage brush. It also didn't differentiate between the port of entries. It was the same emblem as the truck services emblem. I didn't like it other than it would re-route quickly. So I thing I will be trying the Rand McNally 700.

Oh, also it had three voices, two male and one female. I like hearing a female voice. But the female voice is not programmed to give you the whole street name or exit. Example: If you were to exit off of I-90 at exit 98 it would just tell you to exit instead of telling you to exit at 98.

The male voice that has the discriptive voice that will tell you to exit and give you a full discription was too low of a voice to even hear in my honda.

 

Bought it a couple of weeks ago. Like everything there is good and bad to it. Before I got it I was using a 3 year old garmin car gps so that is what I to compare it to.

-Clear turn and lane assist, these are excellent features when approaching major interchanges.

-When searching for an address the auto-complete (it may have a different name but works like auto-complete in a word processor) works great.

-Planning a multi stop route is simple.

-The screen is very clear

Now for the bad. To be honest I am disappointed so far. Keep in mind I have only used it for a couple of weeks, mostly in Northern Ontario.

-It seems to have issues with knowing where the road is. It often thinks I am just off the road, these are locations the garmin had no issues with.

-POI's or points of interest, there are many. When you search for a point of interest you have three choices, you can search near current location, near a different city or on your current route. Once you make that choice you can choose from a big list of categories and sub categories, you can search all or you can search by name.When searching near current location or a different city it will keep searching seemingly forever in an ever widening radius and will go more than two hundred miles. However, when searching near current route it will only search 30 miles or so ahead. Once you have results you can choose one or you can choose to show on map. This will display a map with corresponding results. Unfortunately the map does not indicate where you are or where your route is.

-You can create your own poi's, you can also create your own favourites. Favourites are also stored in one list. They cannot be categorized, they cannot be searched and the list is in order of newest created to oldest created as opposed to alphabetical or closest to where you are. Now you poi can be categorized and can also be searched. That is much better than the favourites. Unfortunately there is no way to copy a favourite to a poi. Ok, so forget favourites and just create your own poi's you would think. The problem there is that when you find a location you can easily add it to your favourites list but there is no option to add it as a poi, that needs to be done separately. Not that difficult if you know the exact location but that isn't always so easy. You have an option to save your current location as a favourite which will be based on gps coordinates which aren't so easy to add to poi's. The same thing if you choose a location by picking it on the map.

-You can add a stop to your route by picking it on a map. This is a great option when you want to change the routing to use a certain road or highway. Unfortunately when you bring up the map it doesn't indicate your route or current location which makes it much more difficult to find the road or exit you want to add.

-Multi stop routes would be great except for a couple of things. When on a multi stop route it will let you know how far it is to the next stop but not how far to the final destination. Not that big of a deal I guess. The other problem I have found is a problem. I had it route me to a stop. Now I didn't take the exit it wanted me to (will explain that later) so instead of rerouting me to that stop it dropped it and moved onto the next one. So if you had to make a detour due to construction when near the stop it would just discard it and move on.

-Back to the poi's, there are many. Unfortunately it has failed on actually knowing where they are. It has been wrong on the locations of 5 different truck stops so far which is why I didn't take the exit it wanted me to when I realized it will discard a planned stop sometimes when you veer from the route.

-Truck routing is the reason to buy one of these though and it has failed on that also. Now I mentioned northern Ontario and so far it has tried to take me a couple of routes where trucks are not allowed. These were both in small towns in northern Ontario and it has otherwise been flawless in the truck routing so I think I just happened to find a couple of rare exceptions. Time will tell I guess.

-Just like the poi's, it has been off by a fair distance on an address that I entered.

-poi's again, one of the categories is rest areas but from what I have seen it only lists rest areas on Interstates, it doesn't list the ones on US highways.

I know there's a few more things but I can't think of them right now. After only a couple of weeks I don't know if I would recommend it or not. For a third generation product I would expect better but it is growing on me.

 

Mr.V, if you're going to work for a large OTR company. Just get a Garmin.

Most companies provide directions. Some good, some bad. Most provide contact numbers too.

It will take awhile to figure out where and when NOT to trust ANY GPS. But you have back up...directions.

 

Wow man. That was a very well thought-out and written review. Your findings match ours, so I just want to add a couple of expansion points on what you have said.

Showing you "off the road." This could be a map error or a GPS positional error. If it is the former then it can be sent it as a MapSure update. If it is signal strength then it would be fixed with an external receiver.

"POI's verses Favorites." The POI manager is greatly enhanced in this series over the previous two. We love that you can add POI categories and select your own icons, and then they are part of the alert/search/display options. Being able to "view map" of the POI results search is very good also. However, the "Favorites" as you say received no changes in functionality and remain as a un-alphabetized list. This is ok for maybe a dozen or so, but becomes a cumbersome method once you store any significant amount. The "Add POI" button needs to be available in trip planning mode, and not JUST by doing a "long touch" on the navigation map screen. The easiest method I have come up with if you want to add a place to your custom POI's is to enter it as a destination (so that you get the little flag" icon on your map) and then tapping it on the map in 2D view to "add POI." If they just added this in trip planning mode, it would be much easier to put them into your custom POI set. In addition they should show your currently planned route on the map when doing a POI search so that you can easily see where they are in relation to your current position and current route. (as you also mentioned)

"Pick on map" - works well, but on every previous model you could view the current route in planning mode and then pick a road to force the route onto. On the 450, you cannot see the current route while using the "pick on map" option. Why they did that is beyond me. You can still touch a spot of road and add it to the current trip to force it on that road. Ironically, for "permit-specific" routing or pilot cars, any of the x40 models with 2010 maps installed is actually more effective at forcing very specific roads to take because of the "pick on map" feature still showing the current route at the same time.

POI positions, addresses, routing: The x50 series is the first one from PC Miler that connects to a computer through this "CoPilot Central" app. Though you do NOT have to use it, the CP Central app allows you too feed back your GPS tracks directly from the unit to help identify map errors. They are advertising a "45-day" commitment to investigate and correct any that you identify and that would be then included in map updates via the Central app every 90 days. The CP Central also allows you to backup or restore the unit from a backup and to import custom POI sets and other program enhancements. I know that their map department has their own map resources as well, but if a driver feeds back a PO position or an address position error, then it would guarantee a quicker fix in the next 90-day update.

Note for Royger's comment: You don't want to turn on the regular gas station icon display (or the alert for them) because they don't apply to big trucks. You want the "Truck Services" icon turned on in the display and whichever (weigh stations, truck stops, whatever) alerts checked. It will alert them all separately according to what you checked, but you are absolutely correct that it uses the same visual icon on the screen for highway exits as it does for weigh stations and truck services. I have been alerting the programmers of this discrepancy for several years.

Voices: In English there is one male voice that does "text-to-speech" (speaks the road names) and one female. The female is in the UK English setting. Then there are about a dozen more male and female choices through the US, UK, and Australian choices that do not to TTS also.

There are a great many positives to this series also, but I am just answering a couple of items brought up in the previous posts in this thread here.

 

While showing me off road it's is showing good signal with numerous satellites so I don't think it is a signal issue. Is that what the 'tracks' will help them correct?

I went to mapsure on their website and was going to provide information on a number of poi's but read this "POIs (Points of Interest) are not part of the MapSure service."

Do you happen to know if there is anyway to provide feedback on the POI's? Here is an example of one, the one I mentioned where I didn't take the exit. The Wilderness Crossing Truckstop in Wittenberg Wi is just off of US 45 south just south of US 29. While travelling east on US 29 it wanted me to take exit 195. Now 195 will get you onto 45 North or take you south into town, 45 then follows 29 for a few miles before heading south at 198 which is where you will find the Truckstop. I think I can see how this error would happen but it's off by a few miles. I can only imagine how much of a pain that would be in a larger metro area.

 

I've got the PCM 740 and it's not that great.. The touch screen response is slow, operating system response is slow, it can't find certain location #'s (house numbers)..

Follows the Qualcomm pretty well, though.

My mentor picked up a Garmin 465t (truck) and that had a LOT on it! Responsive, easy to use, and a touch screen that actually worked! No updates for the PC miler and the software costs you, but the Garmin was easily updatable... I updated it when he bought it in a matter of minutes.. and it even came with the patch cord. Good to roll!

 

Well, kinda...

1. The PCM740 gets an update every year, and it occurred last week. Yours likely does not have that on it. ($49.95)

2. The 465T averages one major map update per year ($90 for lifetime maps or $49.95 per update, your choice) and has had 7 free program updates to fix bugs and add enhancements since it came out.

3. ALL of the 7-inch screen devices (PCM, Rand, Cobra, WorldNav) respond to button presses slower than a 4.3" because of the additional horsepower need to drive the graphics on the bigger screen. That's like being surprised that your truck pulls a hill better when the trailer is empty. In an apples-to-apples comparison, the PCMiler 4.3" size has the same response times as the 456T.

4. Garmin uses the same maps/addresses as Rand TND and Microsoft Streets and they are very good. But the routing choices in a big-rig (although a LOT better than a "car" GPS) are not as solid yet - so tell your mentor to watch out for those neighborhoods and low bridges.