Getting there with Google Earth

[scollins]

Air2air previously said:

.
It's supposed to start up and just follow you along as you drive.

It does start up and follow me - that works perfectly, but I'm not able to just click on my current location and get "directions from here". That's not a big deal, but I thought it would work that way...

[Mr R2FJ]

Wow cool! I've often thought about this but I have the same question. Is the aircard fast enough to keep up with the high bandwidth demands of GE? I often use my cellphone tethered when traveling, but I also find that the areas I'd really want to use GE in (offroad trails) my reception isn't good enough to really use this solution without a lot of caching. Do you find you have to use caching on the trails or does the aircard provide pretty good reception?

[Air2air]

Great question R2. I am told that Sprint is way faster, certainly fast enough. I have Cingular and it is...OK.

For our Death Valley trip there was no service at all. However, it still worked perfectly by doing the following:

1. Before the trip, draw the trails out and save them in a folder in "My Places".
2. Using the car's computer at home, do the Fly-To tour of each trail. Just push the play button and let it run. This caches the trail images in.
3. If you want to be really sure, do this even at high and low altitudes. I found that high altitude with a flattish (60-degree) view angle got everything in.

Out at Death Valley I was surprised to find that it all was cached. It was way more than adequate. When you are driving out of the reception area you will get a prompt that says "should GE continue and continue to try and fetch images, and display errors?" Just hit "ignore" and GE will just continue on from the cached images, no problem.

[Mr R2FJ]

interesting.. I'll give that a shot, thanks for the info!

[Air2air]

scollins previously said:

It does start up and follow me - that works perfectly, but I'm not able to just click on my current location and get "directions from here". That's not a big deal, but I thought it would work that way...

OK when you want to do that, you have to pause the GPS first. Do the following:

1. Uncheck "Temporary places". This pauses the GPS feed.
2. Put a placemark on your current location.
3. Right-click the placemark and select "Directions from here".
4. Find your destination target and select "Directions to here".
5. When you're done, recheck "Temporary places" to restart the GPS.