pmillson

Update: after a good deal of confusion, and this is something that could confuse a stupid person, I have finally realised, with the help of a hex editor, that the problem is nothing to do with id tags or security, it's to do with the way Macs and Windows encode carriage returns in unicode documents. If you create a plain text document in a Mac, and type in the code for the vCard, the underlying hex code for the carriage returns will mean that the Amundsen does not recognise the vCard. If you download from the VW website and edit the file, it works (as long as you don't replace the carriage returns) because you have Windows-encoded carriage returns (0D 0A). Mac carriage returns are just 0A. If you have a Windows computer, you don't have a problem: just use the above vCard code and edit and save in plain text. If you have a Mac, you need to generate the file on a Windows machine (Windows emulator might work), or download from the VW Navcompanion app as above and edit, or edit the code in a hex editor. God the hours I've wasted on this. OCD.

Zhyryk's guide is very useful but it didn't quite work for me, because the manufacturers seem to have added another 'security' feature which prevents the machine from recognising vCards created in a text editor. (WHY? WHY? WHY?) However, if you use the VW 'Nav-Companion' web application, which is only on the VW website, not the Skoda website, to generate a vCard, it places an id tag on your SD card, and you can then create your own cards and navigate where you like. In case anyone is wondering 'Why bother?', this is the only way with the Amundsen that you can navigate to co-ordinates rather than postcodes, which is essential for someone like me who lives in a very rural area. So here, in case anyone else is interested, is the procedure, modified from Zhyryk's post. Sounds complicated, but really isn't, and works well. - go to http://www.volkswagen.de/de/navigation/rns-510/adressnavigation.html and follow the instructions. Just enter a postcode in the box marked 'Ort', hit 'Suche starten', then select one of the places in the list and hit 'Speichern'. This will download a vCard of the chosen destination with the extension .vcf. - Create a folder 'Destinations' in the root directory of a standard SD card. - Copy the vCard you have downloaded to that 'Desinations' folder. - Insert the SD card into the Amundsen, select 'Nav', then select any of the symbols for choosing a desination - Address, Destination Memory or Last Destinations. - Machine should say 'Preparing vCards', then the bottom left button will change to 'SD Destinations' - Select 'SD destinations', and the destination you downloaded will be displayed. You can import it to the machine's main memory or just select it and start navigation. Now you can create your own vCards to navigate to any lat/long co-ordinates. The following is the minimum code required: BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 GEO:55.726302;-1.952211 FN;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:Cocklawburn END:VCARD The co-ordinates must be in the form above, i.e. decimal, not minutes and seconds.You can get co-ordinates from Google Maps by right-clicking on a point and choosing 'What's here?', or you can convert from OS grid using a host of web pages and apps. The FN; line is the name of the destination. So simply copy and paste the above into a text editor (e.g Textedit (Mac) or Notebook (Windows)), substitute your own co-ordinates and place name, save in a PLAIN TEXT document with any filename you like (Amundsen will just read the FN name) and the extension .vcf, , and save to your SD card. One card per destination. Works very well and a lot cheaper than scrapping the machine and buying a Columbus, which is what I was facing. By the way if you want to update your maps with this version of the machine, you can only do so with a genuine Skoda SD card - machine will not read maps from any other card. No SD card is supplied with the machine. Each Skoda card is 'assigned' to a particular machine when it is first inserted, so you can't borrow one. How much do you think they want for a genuine Skoda SD card? £210. I kid you not. Next time, just buy a Tom Tom or Garmin - that's what I would have done but for various reasons I won't bore you with I need an on-board machine. Hope this is useful to someone.

I have the same model, not supplied with an SD card. If you want to update your maps, you can download for free, but the machine will only read the data off a Skoda SD card. How much? According to my dealer, £182 before VAT. I kid you not.