Alex Harries's diary

I seem to have an unnatural fear of subscribing to anything which requires payments to keep it running, so instead of trying out TomTom's own traffic information service - which costs €40 a year plus the cost of data over your mobile phone from TomTom - I've picked up an RDS-TMC aerial which is supposed to pick up traffic status information encoded in FM radio broadcasts, which the TomTom will then use to warn you about incidents on your route. It cost £70 but I shouldn't have to pay anything more to use the service.

According to the ITIS website - which is one of the two providers of traffic info for the UK - there's 95% coverage of traffic info, according to their map... (© ITIS of course):

Unfortunately, that 95% only refers to how many people can receive traffic info - the actual coverage of traffic monitoring seems to be much, much lower, but I haven't found any figures on that yet. 

TomTom's own website mentions that the RDS-TMC information is less comprehensive than TomTom's own (paid-for) service, but I wasn't prepared for the amount of people who have complained how poor the information seems to be across the UK. At the moment I'm making my way through this 12-page forum discussion by other people with the same setup, and it's not looking good so far (at page 5), but I'm holding out some hope yet...

Unfortunately, I've had to ditch the iPod controller (which lets me play my iPod through the TomTom, but can't be used alongside the RDS-TMC receiver), so I'll need a new head unit for the car which can do iPod-related stuff.

I have too many toys; coming soon - my kidneys on eBay...