New Truck GPS

Maybe I’m just cheap, but I plan my routes with a combination of Google Maps, Hammer, and my Rand McNally Motor Carriers Atlas. I put pins in the Google Maps routing to get me around any low bridges/no truck routes, and then I use Google Maps for my actual navigation. Only a fool just blindly follows ANY GPS without double checking first, and GM has the best current traffic conditions, police reports, etc.

I’ll add that in 6 years of truck driving and several years of commercial bus driving before that (since Google Maps started offering true GPS functionality), I’ve only had a few bad experiences, all because I didn’t double check.

 

This is correct -- trust, but also...verify.

Comparing your truck GPS-generated trip solution to the info shown in a Rand McNally Trucker Atlas is never a bad idea for trip planning.

Some other suggestions for new GPS users:

• Make sure the end destination generated by your truck GPS matches up perfectly with that shown by Google Maps (satellite view). If not -- figure out which is actually correct, & why the other is wrong. Then you can run your trip with confidence.
• Make sure your GPS routing near your destination (away from an interstate or state/federal hwy) is giving you truly truck-friendly streets & roads. This is probably best done with Google's street & satellite views. Watch out especially for concrete curbs in the wrong places, & clutter on/near street corners...combined with narrow streets. Those are big rig gotchas.
• If push comes to shove -- to make sure I entered a customer's property at the correct entrance/location -- I would drop a pin at that same location using Google Maps (via satellite view). When this happens -- of course, that pin drop now produces a set of GPS coordinates. Any decent GPS unit from Garmin or RM will let you use these same coordinates as your "destination". Not sure at this point if Trucker Path or Hammer will let you do this. CoPilot will.

-- L

 

Great idea but I still advocate to have a GPS. I know with the Garmin you can plan routes very easily. If you want to use the road atlas so be it and the. Program it into the GPS. I don’t care who you are, you’ll never remember an entire route with 20-30 turns.

 

I use it and have had very few problems with it. Sometimes it’s the same as the co pilot and sometimes it’s quite different. I’m always driving places I’ve never been so I run both and trip plan as best I can. I like trucker path and I’d recommend it.

 

I absolutely agree with you, that’s why I drop pins!

 

Yeah, dropping pins and then using those coordinates is the varsity level trick for getting exactly to the right entrance at a customer. I wish I had learned to do it early instead of the last 6 months before I retired. I spent LOTS OF TIME in the Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Portland areas. SLC is growing so fast and at least half of their warehouses are in areas that had no roads 1-2 years ago. My RM GPS only accepted house numbers in certain ranges on certain streets. Well the new streets and the extension of existing streets really played havoc with that RM feature. But the dropping a pin in Google Maps, and then entering those pin coordinates into the RM GPS worked wonders.

I also learned to look up customers by name on Google Search & Maps, and also look up the street address without any company name. Sometimes the same location was only known by a new name or address. Also, ALWAYS READ GOOGLE REVIEWS. There is sometimes very helpful info in some of the reviews about which entrance, arrival procedure, wait times, and which of the 18 unmarked man-doors on a 5 acre warehouse is the one to find shipping/receiving, etc. The locations that have retail and warehousing have way more consumer reviews of the products or services that overwhelm the reviews from past truck drivers. Also, always leave a review yourself to help out the next driver. Bonus points if you have a phone number to the office you leave in the review.

 

On android the phone settings track how much data any app uses. Settings, Connections, Data Usage, Mobile Data Usage, scroll down to the app and it will show you how much data is used. You can calculate a daily data rate and multiply it by a month to see if you have the data plan to support it.

IMO, every driver ought to get their phone service through US Mobile AND NOT VERIZON, ATT, T-MOBILE. US Mobile buys data from the Big 3 and sells it to customers at half the cost and often with twice the data and little or no taxes and fees. So if US Mobile is advertising their $15/15 GB plan you pay $15, not $15 plus $13 in taxes and fees. US Mobile sells plans on ALL THREE CARRIERS and they allow you to switch between carriers. I used Verizon network for 20 plus years and recommend them all over the country. But I always bought my Verizon connection from my cable TV provider which gave me a better price & data on the Vzw network than Vzw.

Trucker Path MIGHT use 1-2GB of data in a month when I used it 12 hours per day for traffic and truck stop parking updates.
The big downside to Trucker Path is it is on your phone and most drivers have their phone mounted to people in China can see them touch it while they drive. So any cop seeing you touch your phone for TP sees a truck driver screwing with his phone while driving. I know a driver that used a BT wireless keyboard on his thigh so he didn't have to touch his phone, just look at it, as far as anyone looking at him knows.