Advice on navi for W124

[telletubby]

My W124 came with a 2 or 3 year old Becker Indianapolis in the radio slot but, although the radio is fine it is not even half as good at navi as my screen mounted TomTom. I live in the countryside and most of the houses and some villages are completely absent from the CD or can't be read.

Can anyone recommend a navi system that would fit into the W124 radio slot that's as good (ie has as many highways and biways) as a TomTom or Garmin? Or are CD based systems never as good?

 

[Bolide]

The Blaupunkt TravelPilot series and the Becker SatNavs are good - I've used both. The Blaupunkt is simpler to operate, and is very logical and well laid out, but the Becker blows it away for build quality and sound quality

They're both very stealthy (they look like a boring old CD / Radio and not anything flashy) but that's probably less of an advantage near Cahors than it is in any UK city

You are very dependent on the detail level of the maps. You can buy a dedicated CD for France for each but I don't know how they compare with a Tom Tom

Nick Froome
www.w124.co.uk

 

[telletubby]

It's strange isn't it. I too love the Becker for its discrete looks and sound quality but despite having bought a new CD for 80 off euros Becker / Navteq Navigations Indianapolis / Indianapolis Pro South West Europe 5.0 which you'd have thought would be good, it's almost useless: not only doesn't it have individual houses (essential if you're looking for some out of the way house name up a mountain), it misses several villages and loads of short cut lanes and roads. The clamp on TomTom and surround youself with a pile of ugly cables does the lot. Ah well. Better keep to the motorways.

 

[Bolide]

The European maps won't have everything - otherwise how would they sell the specific country maps?

Nick Froome
www.w124.co.uk

 

[Setanta]

It costs a lot but the Alpine system that was in my S500 was just stupidly good - not surprising when the prev owner was an ex-RAF navigator!

Alpine IVA-D310R
Alpine NVEN099P
Alpine KCA-420i

Often sold as a package

*I should have taken it out of the car before selling...grrrrr*

 

[telletubby]

Interestingly I've just got this reply from the outfit that sold me the CD.

Unfortunately, there is no possibility to improve the given maps by installing additional data or something like that. I cannot tell why these smaller villages are not part of the CD’s content. Maybe the next version is better. But as the Indianapolis uses CDs the available disc space is very limited, thus Becker might have considered to leave out some of the smaller villages or less populated areas.

 

[jberks]

given how small the tomtom map files are (sit on a card with a far smaller capacity than a CD and that includes all the programs, POIs etc), that doesn't cut much ice. I suspect its more likely that the mapping firms haven't spent much time in those areas yet, preferring to concentrate on cities and population centres.

I had a tomtom map for the Canaries, but when I tried it in Lanzarote, it had about 10% of the roads on it and was completely useless, putting me in fields 99% of the time. Even the town data was a fraction of the actual roads.