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GPS navigation: A big thanks to MapMyIndia GPS, a true road pilot!

5-6 days before starting on our road trip, we realised that GPS had played a big role in helping us get to really cool places in Alaska and Grand Canyon region. But then we thought, India is different, for two reasons:

• One, GPS in India is still not a developed product - the maps are probably still not that detailed
• Two, one can always ask for directions in India by just stopping by at a corner

Based on the above two reasons, we thought, its not worth investing in a GPS for a 18-day trip, esp. when we wouldn't be using it regularly thereafter.

I went ahead with route planning and we were thinking of clocking 700-800 kms a day. This meant that as far as we could keep ourselves from the cities, the better would be our chances of meeting this daily target. This is when the thought of GPS flashed through our heads again and after a bit more of research on forums like Team-BHP, we decided to get a GPS.

I frankly didn't expect much - I wanted national highways, important state highways and bye-passes of major towns was in my extended wish list! We got the "road-pilot" model from MapMyIndia Chennai dealer and it looked good on paper for sure with lots of features and our research showed that it had the most detailed maps of India - other international brands like Garmin were far behind in the race.

But, little did I know how good it would actually turn out to be. I must say, both the GPS unit and the maps were fantastic and truly beyond my extended wish-list! It's a beauty - the GPS has lots of very good features. Aditi used it a lot more and will add to this post at a later date, but in summary, I personally found the following features of the GPS machine of great value as far as our trip was concerned:

• Ability to add via points: Very important for a road trip, we could marry the hard copy directions and what we would hear from local experts (take X road, avoid Y, etc) to what the GPS route
• Multiple options to select route: GPS had the capability to look for the route from point X to point Y too (should be a rather simple feature) - this helped us plan in advance. In addition, it had all standard options - fastest, shortest, optimal, etc
• Sleep mode: Very smart, I would just put it to sleep and it would turn on at the first instant when we would return after a lunch break - no time lost looking for satellites
• Connectivity: Great connectivity - we always had 6-9 satellites in view. For a GPS to work, one needs 3 satellites at the minimum (to solve for x,y,z co-ordinates in a 3D space) and 4th satellite is considered good to avoid multiple solutions. Thus we were never short of the right number of satellites - here the credit clearly goes to ISRO and NASA! MpMyIndia device however was fast to connect to different satellites - a problem that i sometimes face with my GPS in Singapore

The GPS Maps of MapMyIndia are amazing. Hats off to the team. Here are some highlights of the maps:

• It very clearly has all major roads - NHs, SHs and even other roads. It even had bye-passes on the maps where they existed. Fantastic work, this is what I needed.
• Every time I entered a town, it still worked - it has all the details of big cities like Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai that we went through. That didn't surprise me that much, though I was grateful to have nice GPS maps. What stuck me the most was that it even had details of small towns - hard, very hard to believe - we went through places like Morbi in Gujarat - a town that I didn't know much about before this trip and even there, I went to a very small lane where only one car could go at a time - my "Road Pilot" could guide me out of that place to our NH even from there. Fabulous, great work MapMyIndia team, you have made all Indians proud. I for one, didn't ever see a road that was not marked on the GPS and I am counting narrow lanes here as well.
• Points of Interests are amazing! Every petrol station on our route was marked - so were tons of other places, including some hotels in towns we went through. As far as hotels as concerned, it clearly didn't have them all, and perhaps not the most important ones as well, but still had a few for every town under budget and luxury categories - helpful never-the-less
• Amazingly precise - this shows how often the team keeps updating these maps. Statistics show that nearly 15% of roads change every year internationally. In India, given we are developing and upgrading our roads, this figure should be a lot more. Which means that the team at MapMyIndia is truly on top of their respective regions.

I have been so amazed by the maps that I actually wrote an email to the guys at MapMyIndia thanking them for a great product. They were kind enough to reply back to the email as well - goes to show a good culture and a strong commitment to the product, I suppose.

I do not personally know how the maps are made. I am hoping that satellite based images are used to draw the roads and then details of POIs are collected on the ground perhaps in a vehicle that can store location co-ordinates. I am just guessing here, will probably look up on google to see how this all shapes up.

To end this post, a big thanks to Map My India team for making a fabulous product - I can comfortably say that the device and the maps were better and more accurate than the ones I have used in Singapore/ Malaysia and in US.

In short, if you ever plan a crazy road trip like we did, please do carry a GPS along. It will help you a lot - it gave me the confidence of even driving through state highways at 1am. Further, I was impressed to see how well it worked in Chennai after our trip - that's always useful too!