so i am very confused about 1 thing which is probably very simple question for all of you. can i type in a location in the navigation system and then put the car in drive and drive along with a CD playing and the navigation will continue to give me directions on where im going. or do you have to swap out the nav disk for the cd to work all the time. i keep readingf about how you have to swap the disk.. isnt this really inconvenient you have to change discs each time you want to type in new directions?

yes its inconvinient.

so there is no way around this? you cant listen to a cd and get directions at the same time?

yes once you input a destination you can remove the nav disc and put in a music cd and still get directions your route is stored.

can you just be driving around with a cd in and at any time push a map button or anything to just show you the neighboring highways and streets? say im not even getting directions anyway could i just have a screen showing me where i am and locations around me?

yes it stores your location. I forget how big the area it stores but it is quite large.

It will store a about 30 miles of a surrounding area. What you need to do is have the nav disk in, plot a route in and around the area you want it to display. Once the route is plotted, eject the nav disk. It will take a about 10 seconds or so while the unit stores the info in memory. Once it has stored the info the disk will eject. You can now cancel the route and the area will remain in memory until you drive too far out of that area or until you plot a new route. I live about 30 miles from work and I can usually display the map in and around my trip to work without the disk in the drive. Once you do drive too far out of that area you will start to drive off of the map and off of the end of the earth. You will also die of course.

Just kidding The map will just zoom out to about 25 miles or so.

ok that seems a bit more reasonable but yet inconvenient compared to other navs ive used. of course this thing has many more functions and fits oh so nicely into my dash so i think im going to get it now

Im willing to bet that this will not even be an issue once you get and use the unit. Also, an ipod solves this problom anyway, I never use the cd slot accept to house the nav disk.

It's not really a problem unless you only listen to CDs and do a lot of long-distance traveling.

I listen mainly to Sirius and occasionally my iPod. I've never used an audio CD with my D3. There are just so many other ways to get music into the system that I haven't had the need to.

Other nav systems do allow you to use full nav and listen to CDs simultaneously. These systems either have two disc slots or use hard drive based navigation. They also generally cost a lot more than the D3.

In response to the opening post, cuz I have one on order ....can you program a route say about 2-300 miles and store that in memory or is that long of a route too large? So you don't have to load the disc as often.

In response to the opening post, cuz I have one on order ....can you program a route say about 2-300 miles and store that in memory or is that long of a route too large? So you don't have to load the disc as often.

I recently traveled from MS to TX all on memory nav, no nav disk, just to see if it would, and it did. Thats just less then 500 miles of course. I hope this answers your question.