Dualing Routing

My current travels have taken me from Western North Carolina to Cape Cod, then to lower Massachusetts. For this first leg of the trip I used two GPS systems.

One reason I'm using dual systems is because I'm trying out a set of mounting systems that attach my handheld GPS to the windshield and my laptop next to my seat. The mounts are provided by Ram Mount and work great, but more about them soon.

I ran my route on my Lowrance iWay 350c self-contained navigator as well as on DeLorme Street Atlas USA 2007 on my laptop. The experience was at times confusing, and at times schizophrenic, but in the end I liked having two systems to rely on because they didn't always agree with each other.

I changed the setup on each from time to time in order to get different perspectives from each. I changed the Lowrance's display from 3D to flat, and from "North Up" to "direction of travel up". It took a bit of getting-used-to, to compare the routings, but in the end it saved me from some U-turns.

There were sections of the routes that didn't agree with each other. That doesn't mean that either was wrong, but it did get confusing at times. Once I selected a course based on one of the systems, the other acquiesced and (usually) matched the current route. But I did find it interesting that even based on the same destination and routing instructions, the systems disagreed so frequently.

I'm off on the next leg of our trip... to Portland, Maine this time. I've been recording the trip with my own version of a dash-mounted webcam, but won't bore you with the 20+ hours of mostly-uninteresting video. But I will show you how I set it up.