On my way out to the extreme Northwestern corner of North Dakota I stopped at a truckstop near the WI/MN line to fill my coffee cup. I browsed around for a moment and noticed that they had the Cobra Nav One 5000 GPS on sale for about a hundred bucks off the normal $500 price.

While I really like my Garmin Nuvi 350 the small 3.5" screen is a bit of a pain to read in a big rig where it sits farther away from me than it would in a passenger vehicle. The Cobra unit has a 5" screen which is huge by comparison. I decided to give it a try.

I used it the rest of the way out to my destination at the Canadian border. I ran it side by side with my Garmin to see how it performed in comparison.

It sucked.

The thing had more bugs than a hobo's sleeping bag. I really liked the big screen, and the audio was really loud which is good in a rig. It also had some really nice features such as over speed warning, a great truckstop database, and for those of us who do a lot of oversized loads it showed the sunrise/sunset times.

The idea is great but the application just stinks. The unit suffered numerous lock-ups and crashes, was very slow in calculating routes, and lost satellite lock many times while the Garmin happily just plugged along.

On my way back through I stopped and returned it for a refund.

There was a Best Buy a couple of blocks away so I went over there to see what large screen GPS units they might have. They had a few models with larger screens.

The Tom Tom looked good until I turned it on and saw that at least half the screen was taken up by stuff other than the actual map.

Garmin also has a large screen model which looked great. The price tag was far too high for my liking though.

I then looked at the Magellan Maestro 5310. 5" screen and when turned on most of the screen is map wwith the data taking up a modest amount at the top and bottom. And it's actually useful data with more available by simply touch-clicking a data item. Very nice.

It also came with a built-in traffic information receiver (and free 3 month subscription to the service) instead of a stupid mp3 player/picture viewer. It doesn't come with Bluetooth, but that's ok because in a noisy truck having a Bluetooth link between my GPS and phone is about as useful as tits on a boar.

It's a navigation device, plain and simple. I bought it.

I've been testing it out for a couple of days now and while it;s taking me a little time to get used to it's menu and input system it's a very nice unit.

The one down side to it is that it is a car navigation system and doesn't know the difference between a car route and a truck route. For someone who blindly follows their GPS that can spell big problems in a rig, but for me it's a tool not something I would blindly follow without question. I always know where I am going and what routes I will take, the GPS is just a great way of knowing when you're coming up on turn off, exits, and locations. not something you should blindly follow. It also serves as an automatic way to track my driving hours and miles for logging purposes, no more notepad that I forget to write in.

I've been using it side by side with the Garmin just as I did the crappy Cobra and over all it's performing quite well. A couple of times while running back roads it's tried to steer me onto roads where a truck has no business going, but simply cruising on past the turn prompts an immediate route recalculation that invariably winds up back on the truck route.

One especially nice feature that not even the Garmin has is the ability to exclude a section of a calculated route. If I pull up the turns list and see that a turn and/or section of the route is obviously not a truck route I simply tap that listed item and then the 'exclude" button which prompts an immediate recalculation. Very nice and it usually picks the route I really want to use.

I really like the big screen. It's very easy to read from my seat. And the audio prompts are quite a lot louder than either my Garmin or the crappy Cobra. Even with the Garmin plugged into the external speaker this unit is much louder and easier to hear, and the text-to-speech is perfect (well, close enough).

I also like the Trip Planner function. You can create a trip with as many stops as you like and it will automatically organize them into a sensible order with a tap of the screen. Very handy for planning out my trip as I can put in all of my delivery stops as well as the truckstops I plan to stop at along the way and then just run the trip without having to worry about entering in the data as I go. The Garmin has no such function.

I think this one is a keeper.

I am now on my way to Western Wyoming with another fire truck. This will make a good run to compare it's performance along side the Garmin on a long trip.