I could barely believe it when I switched on my RNS 315 navigation device in my new Volkswagen Touran for the first time. But unfortunately it was true. This (approx.) 800 € navigation device misses features that my 8 year old TomTom is capable of! The most frustrating thing for me was that it is not possible to simply move the map by finger, point to an arbitrary position and let the device calculate the route to that point. I consider this as a very basic feature.
Ray of hope
After searching the internet and playing with device for a while, I found a nice feature that at least lowered the frustration. The RNS 315 has the capability to read vCard Files (.vcf extension) with geo tags inside from an SD card and calculate a route to these targets.
Second frustration
On the Volkswagen website there is a tool that can generate such vCard files. BUT! According to the Volkswagen hotline the vCard feature is officially released only for RNS 510 (the big brother of RNS 315). As a consequence the files generated here do not work on RNS 315. Really great!
Nice solution
After having a closer look to the generated vCard files and after searching some more forums for advice, it turned out that the reason for not accepting the generated files was, that RNS 315 does not accept longitudes or latitudes with more then 6 decimal places.
So finally I decided to create a litte website that helps all neglected RNS 315 users to utilize this really convenient feature. And here it is:
www.spiels-mir.de/navi
Just click somewhere on the Google map. Press "Create vCard" and save the file to a directory named "destinations" (all lowercase!) on your SD card. That's it. Now the "SD card" softkey should become active when you insert the SD card in your navigation device and you can choose the previously saved targets.
Now I wish you more fun with your RNS 315 compared to what you had until now. :-)
Additional information
For all who want to know more details here they are:
- The SD card must be formatted either FAT or FAT32
- The directory on the SD card must be called "destinations" (all lowercase) and must lie in the root folder of the card.
- Longitude and latitude must not exceed 6 decimal places
- The .vcf file must be ANSI encoded (not UTF-8)
- At the end of each line there must be a <CR><LF> (<LF> only, like on UNIX systems is not enough)
- The device can read a maximum of 200 files from the "destinations" directory (I didn't check this myself!)
HINT 1: When testing I first always got the error message "Error: SD-Card". This message is missleading. I thought that the SD card might not be compatible or the filesystem might not be readable. But you get this message also when everything is fine with the card, but there is simply no file there to read.
HINT 2: When I found out that the card was ok, I afterwards got the message that there are no vCard files on the card. But this was not true. They were there. The device spits out this message also when it finds the files but cannot read the content correctly. In my case it was the <LF> instead of <CR><LF> that caused the problem.
