The first satellite navigation device I owned was a Tom Tom Go 300, bought for me as a present at Christmas 2005. It worked OK in the main but the maps were a disappointment. In the first place, the realignment of the A1 round the Ferrybridge area had been completed months before the device was purchased but the map dataset contained the old road network. Secondly, map updates were expensive and some major road changes (including the A1 realignment which took them several attempts to get right) took years for them to deal with. Indeed, I didn't buy all the map updates whilst I had the device because they were so expensive and inaccurate.
We had a Citroen Berlingo at the time and found that the supplied mount was awkward to use because the windscreen was so far away. To solve that problem I bought an after market set of alternatives, including a "swan neck" mount which brought the sat nav much closer to the driver. When we bought our Autoquest, in June 2006, we started to use the Tom Tom Go 300 with it as well as with the car. Even with the swan neck mount, though, the depth of the dash made it inconvenient to use a suction mount on the windscreen. Having seen a tip elsewhere I purchased a plastic clipboard (around £1) from Asda onto which the original mount could be fixed, the whole then being held in place by the built in dash clipboard, as in the photo. |
When it came to mounting the Noza Tec I tried a couple of options as shown by these photos (bearing in mind that the device was for navigator rather than driver use) but both proved unsatisfactory. | I then realised that the cup holder was the correct diameter to hold a length of plastic drainpipe. I had a plastic sat nav mounting disc which I wasn't using so fixed that to the piece of drainpipe using gaffer tape in order to give a surface to take the suction mount. That worked OK at first (especially as the device can be viewed by both driver and passenger) but warm weather softened the glue on the tape making the mount unstable. |
At the end of March 2015, Aldi had the Garmin Camper 760 LMT-D as one of their specials at a very good price. Garmin had also started to show POIs on the route and had revised their traffic warnings which, though still not perfect, are much better than in 2010. The Noza Tec had crashed a couple of times so we decided to treat ourselves to an Easter present. Having established use of the cup holder gave an appropriate position, the question was how to actually mount the device. Happily we had a plastic tub (which had originally held facial cleaning pads) which was the correct size to fit in the cup holder. It has a screw on lid, to which the suction mount adheres, and that overcomes the problem of warm sunshine melting glue. The photos show the Garmin sat nav in position with three views of the tub based mounting arrangement. |
The fact that the Mio also has a camera means that finding a suitable position for both camera recording and sat nav use isn't as easy as for stand alone units. It was made easier in that, for us, the driver is served by the Garmin and the other devices in the trial were tools for the navigator to use, coupled with the fact that we already had a stand-alone dash cam. The Mio was initially mounted on the windscreen to facilitate sat nav use by the navigator but it was above the TomTom and that was less than ideal for the camera. As a result I had a look at creating a platform for the Mio mount on the motorhome dash tray but it was made difficult by the rounded shape of the dash. However, after a think I came up with a solution as to how to attach an old dash disk that I had which had had its self-adhesive pad removed. I attached three pieces of Sugru (two and one) to the disk to make a shape which would cope with the different levels of the dash and simply pressed it into place. Within 24 hours the Sugru was cured and the Mio sat nav sat securely as shown by the photos to the left.
Dispensing with the TomTom, together with the fact that the camera in the Mio Combo 5207 LM Truck was working well, I decided to transfer the Mio camera into our car and mount the 5207 in its place (right) where it will do both jobs. |