Kenwood Nav Advice

[pips06]

Hi, im looking for advice from anyone that has experience using either the Kenwood KNA-G431 or the KNA-G510 (US version). I've read of numerous people that have successfully purchased the US unit and then simply purchased the Garmin City Navigator software. Im trying to find the best place to buy the Garmin maps from. Does anyone know whether the maps can be simply downloaded from a torrent site and simply copied to an SD for use?

Ben.

[loweart]

Hi, im looking for advice from anyone that has experience using either the Kenwood KNA-G431 or the KNA-G510 (US version). I've read of numerous people that have successfully purchased the US unit and then simply purchased the Garmin City Navigator software. Im trying to find the best place to buy the Garmin maps from. Does anyone know whether the maps can be simply downloaded from a torrent site and simply copied to an SD for use?

Ben.

Hey Ben,

Talk about rotten timing, as I only sold my Kenwood KNA-G431AU and associated headunit last month otherwise I would have copied off the map from the SD card for you.

Ok, if you want to purchase the Garmin City Navigator software may I suggest you get in touch with the guys at Johnny Appleseed and I believe they have stores in Sydney. See -> http://www.ja-gps.com.au.

Some extra information of note for you is that March last year I purchased a Samsung Blackjack II smartphone from the U.S. and "hacked" the Windows Mobile 6.0 on the device so it could run the Garmin GPS software on it. I downloaded City Navigator 2008 from the net and the appropriate activation keys and was able to use the software to create a base map for Australia and save onto a micro SD card and loaded it successfully onto the Samsung smartphone. It worked a treat. Unfortunately, I no longer have the software or the phone for that matter so I can't even pass this on to you. But in saying that, when I purchased my Kenwood Garmin GPS box and went to copy the supplied base map onto a spare SD card I had, I noticed that I still had a backup of the base map that I previously created for my Samsung smartphone on this spare SD card. Out of curiosity, I inserted this SD card into the Kenwood/Garmin GPS unit and tried several times without any success in getting it to work. I looked at the structure of the base I had previously created for the Samsung smartphone and compared it with the base map that was supplied on the SD card provided Kenwood/Garmin and it appeared similar. So I don't what gives, but I didn't take it any further.

If you have the time and patience, may I suggest that you have a DIG around the forums on www.modaco.com for Garmin GPS software and Samsung Blackjack II smartphone and the threads ( hopefully still there ) will point you to resources on where to "get" City Navigator from and how the activation works.

It may also pay to have a chat to the boys at Johnny Appleseed to find out what can/can't be done so you don't spend time trying to get something to work when there may be other considerations.

Hope this information is of some help to you.

Cheers,
Lok