Rand McNally RVND 7720 upgrade to Tab-6 experience

[PLsherman@att.net]

My current, not finished, trip included almost missing multiple road changes because some interchanges were rebuilt after the last 7720 map update. I took advantage of RM's (Rand McNally) discount offer to upgrade my 7720 to one of their new Tab 6,7, or 8 trucker models to resolve this issue. I chose the Tab-6 because it uses the same type of suction cup slide-in mounting as the 7720 and would be a direct replacement for the old unit. I was hoping to transfer two pieces of data, my contacts and fuel history to the new unit but was disappointed to discover that there's no way to transfer the fuel history to the new unit. The Tab-8 will let me dump its fuel history to a csv file that I can download to my computer and I'll be doing that to add new fuel data to the spreadsheet that contains all of the fuel data from the 7720. Full fuel history will now be available only on my computer. I also decided to enter all fuel information for my current trip into the Tab-8, providing a few thousand miles of history which should give me a reasonable average fuel efficiency.

Unlike the 7720, the Tab-6 (and I assume Tab-7 and Tab-8)  are not dedicated navigation devices. they're Android tablets containing Rand McNally's navigation application that includes everything you'd expect in a GPS navigation device for an OTR trucker. The map icon in the Contacts app is linked into the navigation app instead of Google Maps. Selecting a destination is a two step process. First you click on the map icon in Contacts then you select the destination from a secondary display that lists possible destinations for the contact's address. When I plugged the Tab-6 into my computer, it showed up with the same icon as my Android cell phone! I was able to activate read and write access to the device's storage but decided to limit my file transfers to the Downloads directory (folder for you Windows folks).

The contacts list was a different issue. The Tab-8 will import addresses using vCards which indicated that it should be possible to transfer the contacts information.  I was unable to find the 7720's contact list in a backup made with RM's Dock program. I did discover that with my Linux (maybe also with Windows) laptop the 7720 was accessible as an attached storage device. After browsing around the 7720's file system, I found the contacts, stored in an sqlite database. I downloaded this to my laptop, installed software that read the database and allowed me to dump the contacts database as a csv file. The csv file was loaded into a spreadsheet to allow viewing and manipulation of the data. The 7720, due to its address searching mechanism breaks the address data into a couple of dozen (or more) fields. This made it impossible to directly create vCards for the contacts but the spreadsheet did make it possible to to easily manipulate all of the fields.

I now needed to determine what data I needed from the 7720 to make the vCards that the Tab-6 would accept. I entered two contacts into the Tab-6, one my home address, the other the FMCA campground. I exported them to vCards and transferred them to my computer. This gave me the template (using a text editor) I needed to build a spreadsheet whose "save as csv" function would create a CSV file that an online converter would convert into vCards that the Tab-8 would import. Building the final spreadsheet from the raw 7720 contacts data involved deleting many columns, moving columns to different positions and adding columns containing a single ";" character. After the spreadsheet was saved as a csv file, it needed some minor editing to remove the spaces around the ";" characters I added to the spreadsheet. I also needed to change the vCard version from the 4.0 the converter generated to the 2.1 that the Tab-6 uses for its vCards. These edits required only three "change all" commands.The edited vCard file was copied to the Tab-6 and imported without issues into the contacts application.

Before I could test the routing capabliities of the Tab-8, I needed to program it with the specifications of my (RV) "truck" . Unfortunately the user guide has no explanation of the characteristics of each of the options. I ended up choosing the "Straight truck" option  because my RV meets the classification requirement of a FHWA class 3 straight truck. RVs over 26,000 pounds will fall under the FHWA class 7 designation. This selection allowed me to enter the weight (loaded and unloaded) as the GVWR and the RV's height and width. No option was available for the length, something I've brought to RM's attention. I also chose to maintain fuel logs for only the truck. Routing options on the Tab-6 are the same as the 7720 unit.

Routing tests were my next task. I quickly discovered that while routes were found for many of my contacts but a significant number of them came up as "not found". A lot of experimentation with the address of the not found ones revealed a bug in the unit's address search function. A complete address; street, city, state, zip could not be found. If either the zip or a combination of city, state were missing the unit had no difficulty finding the address to map out a route. For these cases I moved the city and state to the "neighborhood" contact field which bypassed this issue. This left me with only one contact that couldn't be located from the contacts list, the FMCA campground. This prompted a call to RM's customer support whose agent had no issues doing this using his Tab-8 unit. A service ticket was opened and I expect that this and the other issues I found will be fixed. I was able to get the Tab-6 able to route me to the campground from the contacts app by deleting the entire address and replacing the street information with the GPS coordinates (decimal format) of the entrance to the campground.

My final task was to compare the routes picked by the Tab-6 to my old 7720 device. All of the destinations I chose to verify yielded the same route for both devices. One advantage of the Tab-8 was the initial routing display showing multiple choices (3) of route to use. This is a significant improvement over the 7720's showing a single route with the option to display an alternate.

My final conclusion is that this was a good upgrade choice. Rand McNally's discounted upgrade offer made this a relatively inexpensive upgrade compared to purchasing a different brand's navigation device.

 

Edited Tuesday at 05:06 PM by PLsherman@att.net
Misspelling in title

[rayin]

Rany McNalley no longer supports any of the RV GPS units. They exited the RV market several years ago. I have obsolete two RM  RV units that are basically useless today. Rany McNalley now  only makes products for the commercial trucking and boating industries.

There used to be aftermarket websites that sold Rany McNalley RV GPS map updates. I never did because you have no way of knowing if they are legitimate, or simply stealing CC information.

I chose to buy a cheap Chinese unit named OHREX through Amazon. It is a trucker GPS and very accurate. Updates come on an SD card and cost $25 ea. I never buy an update, instead buy a new unit every other year, as they only cost $60 ea.

I see today OHREX has a 9" model with free lifetime maps for $89.

I don't know about anyone else, but those prices sure beat any name-brand sold, and IMO are just as accurate.

Edited Thursday at 08:25 AM by rayin