IGuidance, BT SIRFIII, Arkon DM320

03-05-06, 09:23 PM

For my X51v, I just pulled the trigger at buygpsnow for their IGuidance combo pack with the BT SiRF Star III receiver and Arkon DM320 mount upgrade. With the 5% discount, it was $212.75 before shipping.

Thanks to everyone that has posted in the last few months - I probably read every post trying to decide on the software. I narrowed it down to IGuidance and TomTom and ultimately selected IGuidance because of the Navteq maps - I understand they are better than what TT uses, although I read that TT has a nicer display and both have equal POI's.

I now need to buy a larger SD card. I think I want a 2G to hold maps, music and video. Any suggestions on which card? I'm posting here about the storage card because I'm interested in everyone's experience with IGuidance and if the application is sensitive to the speed of the card - is it? BTW, are faster cards always faster or is the "weak link" somewhere else? Any help on card selection would be appreciated. TIA

03-05-06, 10:16 PM

I have an x50v with WM5 and the same combo of gps/ig and it works great. I use a 4GB cf card and have the whole US on at once so I am totally seamless whenever I need a map. But If you only need small chunks at a time then you can use the card that you refer too and it should be fine. You can go to the IG site and somewhere on there it will tell you the size of each states map. If you want to hold all of the stuff you talked about I would shoot for a 4GB. The speed isn't all that crucial except for when you are transfering stuff to it. The bottleneck is the pda itself so even the slowest card is ok. where you will notice it is if you use a card reader to transfer stuff to the mem card. I have a slow cf card and it took about 25 minutes to transfer a little over 2GB to it if I remember correctly. But for me it doesn't matter as I only had to do that once. smaller files take seconds to minutes so it really isn't a big deal. good luck

dmanindfw · 03-21-06, 05:26 PM

Actually it sounds like I just bought a similar bundle as yours just with a Haicom receiver. I also did a lot of browsing and think I made a good choice too by going with iGuidance.

In regards to the CF or SD cards, it is always my opinion to go bigger especially if you can find a great deal. With that being said, buy.com has a KILLER deal on a 2 Gig CF card...$69. On top of that there is a $19 mail in rebate worth another $19 back. All in all you pay only $50! FYI, this is also a very good brand...Kingston. I looked at many sites and that by far was the best deal I could find. Everyone else's low was $70-$75.

Edit...oops, just saw that you were looking for an SD card. However if you Ax can also take CF, that is a stellar deal.

ilshriner · 03-21-06, 07:06 PM

Amazon has the Seagate 4GB CF card for $74.09 with free shipping

solara · 03-21-06, 11:11 PM

@paulcb
@dmanindfw

Please report back on your experiences with the x51v and the BT-338 with iGuidance. Would like to find out if there are any problems pairing with the BT-338 and maintaining the connection after turning the PDA off and on again. Thanks.

As for storing the maps, I am using iGuidance 1.1 on an iPaq (yes, ancient) and I find that the larger the database, the longer it takes to look up addresses - pretty obvious. So what I did was create several different map databases instead of one large one - one for the entire bay area, one for just the city of San Jose where I drive most of the time, and one for the entire state of California. I store these maps under their own folder and change the name of the folder to the default iGuidance one when I want to switch between them (using a file manager - takes a few seconds to do). If I decide to go to other states, I just upload the appropriate states through my card reader. So while it's nice to have the entire U.S maps on one card - I imagine it slows things down by having it all in one database - I haven't used the latest version so I'm not sure if they changed the management of the maps to overcome this problem.

Even for those who routinely drive to several states, I can't imagine why anyone would need to have the ENTIRE U.S. on one card - yes, it's nice in theory but if I don't ever plan to visit North Dakota, why have it on my card wasting space and slowing down the program because of the increase in size of the map database?

dmanindfw · 03-21-06, 11:50 PM

Originally Posted by solara

@paulcb
@dmanindfw

Please report back on your experiences with the x51v and the BT-338 with iGuidance. Would like to find out if there are any problems pairing with the BT-338 and maintaining the connection after turning the PDA off and on again. Thanks.

Actually I must now reveal myself...I do not own an Axim but instead an *cough* Ipaq. All the very active threads about GPS drew me to this site. I also did not purchase the BT-338 although that was my second choice. I instead went with the Haicom 406BT-C (slightly gimmicky led compass model). However I will report how well this combo works.

dmanindfw · 03-21-06, 11:58 PM

Originally Posted by solara

Even for those who routinely drive to several states, I can't imagine why anyone would need to have the ENTIRE U.S. on one card - yes, it's nice in theory but if I don't ever plan to visit North Dakota, why have it on my card wasting space and slowing down the program because of the increase in size of the map database?

An excellent point...I will heed this advise. I did go with a 2 gig since it was a great deal. Plus even if I only have 500MB used for Iguidance, I will also be using an offroad program (maybe Memory Map) and will want to store topo maps, maybe aerial photos, and tracks and waypoints. After dealing with computers for so long, you realize that there is no such thing as TOO MUCH memory. Hmmm...remember 40 MB (not GB) hard drives. Those were considered HUGE back in the day.

dmanindfw · 03-22-06, 12:00 AM

Originally Posted by ilshriner

Amazon has the Seagate 4GB CF card for $74.09 with free shipping

Yeah, well, thanks a lot for making me feel better about my purchase now

Hopefully that 2 Gig will tide me over at least for a month or two :)

solara · 03-23-06, 08:34 PM

That 4gb Seagate is a microdrive and is slower and less durable than the flash CF from Kingston. I also got the Kingston Elite Pro 2gb CF.

03-23-06, 10:11 PM

I've used IGuidance and the BT SiRF Star III (BT-339) for about 3 weeks now. It's been almost flawless (IGuidance has crashed maybe 3 times (just disappeared)). The bluetooth connection works very well - I can turn my PDA off and it picks up the connection everytime it's back on. The receiver reception has been great except in a Chicago cab where the buildings probably blocked the signal. The software seems to be very good (it's my first GPS software). So far, every street has been mapped. I'm also using a 4G SD card with the whole USA on it - seems to work perfectly. Now I don't have to regenerate a new map everytime I travel.

All in all, this is a great setup and I would highly recommend it.