Customer Reviews

Garmin GTM 20 FM-Band Traffic Receiver

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

I purchased this for my Nuvi 650. My husband and I do not commute to work during rush hour, but we do tend to drive to visit my parents' around the evening rush hour. We figured it would be handy to help us avoid the Long Island traffic that turns our 25 minute drive into an hour drive around that time. We have several different main road options to choose from, and we were hoping it would automatically route us to the ones that had no traffic tie-ups. Here's how it really works:
It continues to route you the normal fastest way, regardless of traffic. Once you get near the road where there is a traffic jam, a small yellow icon appears on the bottom right hand corner of the GPS, with a number inside it. That number is the amount of minutes you can expect to be sitting in traffic on the road ahead. Touch on the icon and it will show you the stretch of road that has the delay and it will give you an option to "Avoid traffic?". ONLY if you click yes, it will route you to a different road to avoid the traffic. (After you click yes, it will ask you something like "are you sure you want to avoid, this route is already the fastest", but click yes again. That route is the fastest WITHOUT traffic, but not with. You can tell this by the new arrival time you are given when you ask for the reroute. It's usually earlier.)
Overall, I like the receiver, it does what I need it to do, only with a few extra steps. Ideally of course, it would ask you right off the bat when you program your route if you want to avoid all traffic, because that small yellow icon can be easy to miss if you're driving alone in the car and not continually glancing over at the GPS. They should play a little sound or something when it pops up! Then it's kind of dangerous to be poking around on the unit while it asks you twice about the reroute while you should be driving! I definitely don't regret buying it, but hopefully future models will have worked out the kinks.

I don't do a lot of out of town highway travel, so I'm not sure this really helps me with my local traffic. I have found it very accurate, but if I have chosen the freeway route, I typically already know what the traffic will be like from the TV or radio. Where I do see some value...it helps to make the ETA on the GPS route more accurate. I think if I drove cross country it would help me decide whether to use through town or perimeter routes as I am approaching large cities. It works, I just don't think it does anything for ME on my daily commutes. I often find myself saying, "oh yeah, there's the traffic jam I see on the GPS". In Atlanta, at least, it does nothing for the surface streets.

Use of this device requires the tightening of the fuse cap every few times that you remove it from the cigarette lighter. If you forget to do this, the cap will eventually unscrew and the pressure from the internal fuse spring will cause 1/2 dozen metal and plastic parts to explode all over your car's interior.

And just when you nicely get into the habit of performing the above, the plastic screw cap will break in two, making the device useless.

I used this for about 2 weeks in the NYC area in December 07. The reports were totally worthless, I was told there was heavy traffic ahead when there was none and not told of traffic and ran into jams without warning. 2 times it reported jams when I ran into them and it was too late. Save your money do not buy any traffic receivers, the technology is too early in development. I wouldn't use it if it was free considering my experience and would rate it "0" Stars if possible. the GPS is great with the NUVI 650 though.

Product broke while trying to remove from cigarette lighter. For a $200 part I'd expect them to design this to be little more sturdy. Traffic updates are barely any use. It oftenly shows an incident that's no longer an issue or doesn't show problems that it should.
Getting this unit with your GPS is fine, just be careful when removing it from the cigarette lighter.
Do not consider buying this if it didn't come with your GPS. It's a waste of money.

The GTM 20 if you will look at the pick has a cheap black plastic round cap that holds in a fuse at the tip away fron the power cord. This piece of junk will easily break because the screw treads are cutting too deeply into the shank. Mine broke simply by pulling it out of the power source and believe me I am very careful with expensive items like this. It should have been made of metal! This thing costs an average of 200 bucks plus! Where is the quality???!!! I hope the government makes this sorry company recall or at least send out a non-breakable screw cap! What a rip off!!!

This came with a Garmin 760 that I purchased last week and already this thing fell apart on me. I picked it up to plug into my cigarette lighter and the plastic ring, connector and fuse just popped off. It was probably already loose from plugging/unplugging it less than 10 times, but it broke so easily that I checked online to see if it was a prevalent problem. 9 reviews so far on Amazon but already 3 people have reported the receiver getting stuck or broken. For the price you pay for this it should last longer than that. I'm contacting Garmin customer service for a replacement and will hopefully update with a positive resolution from Garmin.

Half of this product is lodged in a rental car's cigarette lighter in NJ. The middle piece pulled out of the main part that inserts into the cigarette lighter, similar to another review listed here. It didn't give reliable traffic info while I had it, but still, to fall apart after 4 months given the cost makes it a less than great value. Don't do it.

Great product but flimsy and expensive. The reason I bought a replacement was the orginal one broke within a year. The portion that plugs into the socket became weak and fell apart. I really like my GPS with the traffic alerts so I broke down and was willing to give it another try.

The original item this replaced broke after about a year when I removed it from the 12V plug in my car. The male end snapped off rendering it useless. The replacement (an identical unit) powered up immediately and, after loading up the most recent software from my Garmin nuvi 760, was up and running providing traffic info after about 5 minutes. The service subscription process is not user-friendly (I had time remaining on my current subscription but the new unit came with 18 months...about a $90 value...so I guess the new subscription over-rode the old), hard to know exactly what the "right" thing to do is.

The Garmin loses a lot of local functionality unless it accounts for the reported traffic conditions along one's route, making the traffic receiver a "must have" accessory. It is very expensive (after all, it's really just a specialized FM antenna) and should be made to handle frequent re-locations between an owners multiple vehicles. Based on my experience, it is more fragile than it ought to be.