GPS Questions

My experience is like yours, no GPS. I love my Rand McNally RM740. It has some quirks that bug me, but it's great for finding customers as long as you have a valid address for the location they want you to arrive, and not some bogus address like #1 Company Name Lane.

Any GPS you get will have feautres you don't use and quirks you don't like. I'd be happy with a Garmin 770 or Garmin 780 just as I'd be with my RM 740. They aren't perfect, my routinely says "keep to the left for XYZ" when it should have said "keep to the right for XYZ". It's ALWAYS correct saying take "I-40 Westbound to ABC" even if it screw up by saying "keep right" when I need to keep left.

The Garmin GPS with live weather & traffic get their data from FM radio sub-channels. It doesn't cost you money, but it also only gets the data when it's near cities big enough to have FM radio with sub-channels. The Rand McNally can give you live weather and traffic, but only via wi-fi or your cellphone data. I don't use my GPS for weather or traffic. I use Trucker Path that gets data from Google maps and is also a moving-map truck stop directory.

Garmin is the expert in GPS but Rand McNally is the expert for maps. Flip a coin and don't look back. You will have complaints which ever you pick. Both units are about $400. You are the captain of your ship so review your GPS route before using it to see if it makes sense. When in doubt, ignore it.

 

I frequently use my GPS in and around Knoxville. It's also ALWAYS telling me to keep left on I-40 approaching Memphis from Nashville when in reality you have to stay right to stay on I-40 going through Memphis toward the west. Mine also has a bogus, non-existant HazMat restriction on I-285 around Atlanta. HazMat is allowed on every inch of I-285 even though the GPS thinks it's prohibited where I-85 and I-285 meet on the north side of Atlanta

 

The truck probably has a Qualcomm which is a messaging system and I think they call their "navigation"system NaviGo. What the Qualcomm lacks in usability, it makes up for with outdated maps.

Get a cheap car GPS for finding local addresses and save your fuel reward points until you can buy a truck GPS. Since you already know how to use the atlas, use it to avoid the truck prohibited routes and low bridges. Use the GPS to find the address once you get to the town. I used Google Maps on my phone for a couple of months before getting my RM 740.

 

No, I wouldn't be lost doing it, but I would be quite a bit slower, the proof being that I've done it for a few weeks at a go in the semi, and when I was driving a small straight truck delivery , that's all I had, no smartphone.

I still think it's fun in a new place to have someone else drive while I sit in the back and read for a half hour or so, then swap spots and see how fast I can get back to where we are staying... (Car game)

 

The MC Atlas is basic. I recommend the large print format version. Not cheap, but easy and enjoyable to study.

A GPS unit is great as a real-time information manager. Mile markers, moving map, ETA, what lane to use, distance to planned exit, etc. For that alone I’d have one. Even on a route I can drive blindfolded.

Once I’ve entered a property and verified I’m in correct place, I’ll move truck to nearest gate and enter location for future (also on phone with notes and numbers for boss & other drivers to share the contact). All I have to do then is enter a destination to see if it takes me outbound the right way.

Sounds complicated, but isn’t. A new habit. HUGE help in dark or rain.

I’ve been using a Garmin the past four years and update it annually. May try the latest version released this month.

One has to learn their quirks. Mine will almost always try to save me a mile. I want to stay on the biggest road the longest time. So I’ve learned to check it’s routing towards the end of the trip. If I don’t, it may cost me (I make notes to verify).

Any notes have to do with checking satellite images of the receiver. Plenty of my work has nothing to do with warehouses or docks. So I’m looking for likeliest ingress & egress.

Sometimes I’ll use the phone map to approximate an address I can enter into the GPS. And I’ll run both devices those last five /ten miles. Sometimes it actually works. Then permanent entry as above.

In short, if mine died, I’d replace it. And I’ve been travelling the country since the early 1960s. No more AAA Trip-Tiks, but they sure were handy. I only recently cleaned out my state issue road maps.

Where paper maps still have their place is with the major cities. Some have two, three or more with great detail.

I think my Dallas/Fort Worth MAPSCO is something like 10-lbs and 400-pages.

For places that size, spend. And have a case to keep them in.

Otherwise I’m happy to recommend Garmin.

And a good CB. No substitute for local knowledge. The faster you are with the GPS, the easier to route yourself around.

WAZE and other phone apps will have you following cars and foreign drivers down residential streets with a 53’ in a re-route. You can enjoy the laughs with the radio as they high center and get stuck on someone’s lawn in a turn.

Good luck

 

Remembered something else. The bad drivers believe tailgating (under 200’) will get them “there” faster as traffic volume builds (nearing a major metro area; 75-miles).

There’s not really a choice except to back off. Reduce speed. Except they don’t make it. Local rock haulers and no spikka da English wheel holders prominent.

Keeping an eye on the GPS helps me figure the ETA change. I can review time and distances instantly.

Meanwhile, all the stoopids are jamming both lanes ahead and all their kollege-eddicated kousins are hurrying to jam up behind them.

Stuff never seen in the America of forty and more years ago.

Times changed on ya, hand. Need the latest tools.

 

It is good you are old school. Never give that up. I am the same way.

With that said we used a original Rand McNally Streets USA GPS System for laptops with serial port for the antenna after 1998 time period. Put the antenna on the dash, laptop to the inverter (300 watt off a cig lighter) and boom you know everything around you and it becomes possible to stay in the middle of the entire interstate in bad storms with it. (Not recommended)

Type in physical address. BOOM shipper or reciever shows up as a dot. Maybe inside small streets.

It does have flaws in that time period. I once came off US 1 in delaware early morning really thick fog. I saw that I needed to turn onto the final street to reach a shipper 3/4 mile away. What I did not see until too late was that someone cut that street, ripped up pavement rerouted it half a mile further down. The right turn I made in that thick fog revealed a fenced celluar tower complex with cables and anchors plus fuel, buildings etc everywhere around us and our 18 wheeler. It's about two acres in size.

Getting out was something. Thank god it was only 3 am and no one was around to see us commit that boo boo.

Fast forward to today, my smart phone has a living map it knows what room of a building I am in at times. Down to maybe 5 feet or less. A living map on that thing allows us to route with our car around the three major pothole roadways to avoid them. We also tie into Idrive arkansas to say take a look at real time Galloway Traffic view camera at the petro truckstop on 40 there to see what's doing. All of that right off the smart phone. Everything is paid for by uncle sam so it's essentially unlimited what i can pull from it if I had to. (I don't make a habit of it.)

Flying in navigation, something I mastered during ground school decades ago has become a world in which there is a broadcasting device that is illegal to turn off in the plane. You can search it civilian or military through a special hobby type portal for our current air traffic for anything in the world currently flying and broadcasting with that device. Two days ago we had a RC-135 orbit over tulsa OK for a few hours at 32500 feet. It's capable and does recieve all ground based moving objects for war purposes and signals of any kind. (That's interesting, but not really when you consider that Tinker AFB in OKC is full of AWACs for command and control) Flying is also GPS based with the addition of a necessary flight plan filed into FAA prior to approval for flight even in a small plane and especially near Washington Baltimore cities and Dulles, Camp David, Fort Richie, Raven etc etc etc. 9-11 changed everything.

Back to trucking.

Robot trucks have delivered beer over 110+ miles without a human on it using GPS etc down to the millimeter on carefully mapped route and escorted by hordes of police all the way. No human driving it. There is most assuredly one in the sleeper minding the thing. "Otto" was the name.

That is where you and your old school habits, maps and books come in. You are the final decider where that truck goes. A 11 foot 8 inch bridge famous on you tube aint it. It's gee whiz nice. But not THAT nice. It's actually supplemented by Google earth.

I took a visit to day near a covered bridge I remembered as a child near Greenspring above the Baltimore Beltway online and was sad to discover that people committed arson and burned the thing forever back in the day. Google earth reveals the ramps that are still there and the river and landscape exactly as i remember it along with certain really old trees I remember. But the bridge itself is gone as of today it does not exist. (Even if it did, it's not for big trucks.)

Another spot on US1 I visited was complete terraforming and new bridge now. All the things I remember from a few important days are all gone except the river. That's still the same.

It's wonderful to get a physical address from someone how to get into such a place, look on google earth and there is that building and so on. Maybe even the actual docks too if you are lucky. So you know what you are getting into.

 

Them days are long gone. I"ll take gps anyday. And i never got steered wrong except maybe a time or 2 in California. Copilot HATES cali. Thank goodness for google.

I loved Copilot. And yes. ALWAYS followed it blindly without any issues. It was nice to input and drive. My atlas very seldom got used. BUT, I also had the settings configured for truck specs.

The atlas is only good for the big picture. And the handy 411 it provides. Other then that. It's useless once you get in to town. It won't get you in or out.

Sygic also has truck gps now. I don't see anyone mentioning it yet. It's in teh app store. And has really nice graphics compared to the plain jane basic layout.

They may be cheap and don't have the bells and whistles but theres free apps for the bells.

 

Awesome post, X1Heavy.

Plenty of pilots in my family, so early learned to listen to and read about that world.

The clincher was what we remember and the traces thereby.

Eastbound on IH40 from Amarillo are the traces of a rail line. Cuts, etc. Double turns so tight it had to be early for this area (1880).

US66 gets the attention (anyone else remember how Iklaha would build curbs on portions of a highway? And then paint them white. A few traces remain. There was no outer lane stripe till not so long ago), funny to see the tourists ignore today what made it “famous” then.

Man’s presence isn’t always obvious. Nor does anything serve so well as a map (a truly abstract thing) as overlay to memory.