Rand McNally GPS

[oldguy49]

I have this posted in that other forum so many of us really like and have received no replys to my questions so I though i would post it here and see if we get any questions answered with out going all over the place.

We all know that RM no longer supports most of the GPS units we use. Most of us are using maps that arte at least 1 year old if not older. That was bad but I am pretty sure we could all work around that if need be.

Unfortunatly they have now decided to discontinue their Trip Maker. I found this out when I went to log on the other day and received this message;

TripMaker Notice

Dear TripMaker user,
After serving road-trippers, truck drivers, RVers, and all who journey across the United States, the TripMaker web & mobile applications have been shut down.

Thank you for choosing us as your maps & directions provider. We wish you the best of luck on wherever the road ahead takes you.

The Team at Rand McNally

I am guessing they shut it down with-in the last couple of months but I am not sure since I have a trip to Ohio University for a football game and to the campground we have never been to before. I could live without the updated maps but with out trip maker I now have a $250 paper weight. Yeah, I can enter my trip manually but that could be a real pain for a multi stop trip. So I have a couple of questions for the experts.

1)Is there another method to download trips with out going thru trip maker and RM's dock software.

2)Can I load trips onto a SD card and install the card in the unit. And will the unit read the trip as such.

3) Would a program that converts Garmin trips(GPX format) to Rands format(CSV) actually work for that purpose.

I really like the Rand unit as it lets me configure the unit for an RV( weight, length etc) but can still be used for a truck/car alone. Realistically, I dont know how much longer we will be rv'ing so there is no sense in investing in another unit for our trips. Really dont like the Google maps mess as it has sent me down to many 1 lane country roads when using it. Fortunatly I did not have the trailer with me or it could have proved interesting.

 

[DennisT]

We use RV Trip Wizard to plan ours.

That has the ability to export in many different formats and csv is one of them.

We export a fox and pull into our Garmin - may work as a csv to the RM as well.

 

[Thetravelingbrowns]

We also use RV trip wizard for trip planning and is our main GPS since it knows what we're hauling. We use Waze for our 2nd GPS and Google maps, which is a great tool for zooming close to see parking lots, campgrounds, etc. I have a large McNally Road Atlas to help when deciding on travel plans.

 

[CaptainGizmo]

RV TRIP WIZARD has been THE BEST tool I’ve used over 5 years. Every trip is preplanned using it.

I will, then, double check the route suggested by my Garmin RV1095 which has the same desired features of your RM. If the route is the same…I’m done! Simple as that!

I’ve found no reason to go through the hassles of exporting and importing a GPX file since the Garmin is so easy to insert stops along the way; on the fly, such as fuel.

I don’t care for the RV LIFE companion app for RVTW though.

If you’d like more info, I recall posting some reviews in the RVTW and trip planning sections a while back.

Try here:

Trip Planning

Discussions related to planning trips, campground information, local area information, getting to/from a campground, etc.

rvforums.com

As well as the RV GPS forum rather than this Tech section.