Thread: Using TMC in Garmin nuvi for free

I am having the same problem of traffic reports not popping up on the map screen either when just driving around, or if there is a traffic condition on a route. I am using a Nuvi 850 (Software version 4.7) with a GTM-20 traffic receiver (software version 5.5). There are two working lifetime subscriptions, TTN & Navteq, both for US. Traffic receiver goes green indicating good traffic data being received, but I have never seen a single alert pop up on the map screen. Last week we were navigating on a major highway which had road construction. We were navigating to a destination which the Nuvi included this particular highway. No alert about the construction ever poped up, but when I manually went to menu->settings->traffic, it said there was road construction .7 miles ahead. It then offered to avoid the delay.

It is my understanding that if you are not navigating to a destination, and just driving around, alerts are supposed to pop up if they are ahead on the road on which you are driving. If you are navigating, and something either developes or was there at the time you calculated the route to the destination, it is supposed to warn you and offer to avoid it for you.

I have turned on the avoid traffic option in the navigation setup, and still no notifications unless I specifically go to traffic to pull them up manually.

I have info from another forum which addresses this problem, and the solution had to do with naming the mapset. When I first went to map setup, and asked for map info, all it displayed was "CN North America NT 2011.10" Nothing else. I opened gmapprom.img in the garmin folder of the Nuvi with gmaptool, and renamed the mapset to "CN North America NT 2011.10 All" and wrote that back. Now when I go to map info, it displays "CN North America NT 2011.10" and directly underneath that is also displays, "[1] All" I have tried all upper case ALL and lower case "All" Neither spelling enables the popup alerts. With everything I have already tried, does anyone else have any other suggestions that I may not have tried? If you have solved this problem, what did you do that I haven't already done?

Thanks in advance,

Howard

06/30/2010 - Update: Apparantly, adding " All" after the mapset name DID fix the problem! Last week I traveled to a nearby major city, and traffic notifications began popping up, whether or not I was navigating to a destination. I think the problem may be that when I am near my home location, although I can receive traffic reports, there are no updates for my particular city. As soon as I traveled into a city that does have traffic coverage, everything seems to work fine.