# "Volkswagen Nav Companion"



## ryan2011 (Feb 11, 2011)

Hi all -

Recently very happy to be a part of the VW family again with a '11 CC Lux Plus. My first brand new car, and my second VW after I sold my '02 Passat GLX a few years ago. 

Still getting used to the Nav interface and frankly wish it would react a bit faster... but I have no clue how to import a destination through the SD card. Anybody know? The owner's manual refers to searching the internet for "Volkswagen Nav Companion" but a google search returns nothing exactly right. NAV Companion is supposed to be a website I can use to save a destination to the SD card. 

I did manage to find this URL through one of the results... but its a few years old and dead-ends inside the vw.com site.... http://www.vw.com/vwhype/navcompanion/en/us/

Any thoughts? 

Thanks!


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## Theseus (Apr 26, 2001)

ryan2011 said:


> ...I have no clue how to import a destination through the SD card. Anybody know? The owner's manual refers to searching the internet for "Volkswagen Nav Companion" but a google search returns nothing exactly right. NAV Companion is supposed to be a website I can use to save a destination to the SD card.


The Nav Companion was replaced by http://www.vwlabs.com.

The RNS-510 can ingest standard vCard files (.vcf). The thing that wasn't well-documented is the fact that they have to be placed inside a directory named "destinations" at the root level of the SD card. So, if I wanted to import evilBossMan.vcf, I'd need to create a folder on the SD card called "destinations", then move the .vcf into that folder.

Once you've done that, insert the card, hit the NAV button, tap the Memory button, and then tap Import Destination. It should tell you how much memory you have free, then show a wizard that lets you choose what to import.


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## scooterabc (Aug 7, 2012)

Theseus said:


> The Nav Companion was replaced by http://www.vwlabs.com.
> 
> The RNS-510 can ingest standard vCard files (.vcf). The thing that wasn't well-documented is the fact that they have to be placed inside a directory named "destinations" at the root level of the SD card.


The first time I heard of Nav Companion is when I opened the owner's manual "RNS 510 Navigation system"yesterday. I had to order it from the vw literature site. For starters, the owner's manual tells you that you have to put the vcf file in a top level "destinations" directory. However, if you today go to the URL http://www.vwlabs.com you will get redirected to http://vwerl.com/ which is an interesting but useless site about VW technology. It's more of an "about us" site.

Googling for Volkswagen Nav Companion eventually yielded this:
http://www.volkswagen.de/de/navigation.html
This _seems_ to be the site that the VW RNS documentation wants you to find, and it's in German. Chrome will translate parts of it accurately into English, the rest is hit and miss.

The site lets you put in an address and create a vcf file from it, somewhat useful. You can also export your contacts from gmail if you use contacts in gmail to a vcf file. I'm not sure what the RNS-510 will do if you import a vcf file with multiple contacts -- guess I'll find out later!

What is more interesting is that the site discusses importing your personal POIs into the RNS-510 - it says "after production week 22 of 2011" - who knows if that means car production week or more likely RNS-510 production week, and probably applies to the European version. None the less, I'll try it. FWIW the POIs go in a top level folder on the SD card named "PersonalPOI".

"Picture navigation" is also discussed as something that can be imported - 
top-level directory named "gps-pictures" with jpg images in it. Using the website, you upload a jpg,, it asks you for an address and notes, and then it downloads a jpg. I'm not clever enough to know if it tags the photo with the address and if that becomes the destination image. So many things to try...

Scott


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## scooterabc (Aug 7, 2012)

scooterabc said:


> "Picture navigation" is also discussed as something that can be imported -
> top-level directory named "gps-pictures" with jpg images in it. Using the website, you upload a jpg,, it asks you for an address and notes, and then it downloads a jpg. I'm not clever enough to know if it tags the photo with the address and if that becomes the destination image. So many things to try...
> 
> Scott


Translation of the website picture navigation function: "Here you can add your own images with address information - this can easily be selected later in our many radio navigation equipment as the destination address."


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## scooterabc (Aug 7, 2012)

*More info on Nav Companion, picture destinations, VCard destinations*

I've done some experimentation and can provide some feedback on the Picture navigation and the vCard destinations navigation. First of all, here is a screen shot of my SD card as it currently stands:










Notice the first three directories: "PersonalPOI", "gps-pictures", and "destinations". The rest of the folders on the SD card contain albums of MP3, so ignore those.

The "PersonalPOI", "gps-pictures", and "destinations" folders are the ones _vaguely_ documented by VW as the folders that need to contain "Personal points of interest", "Destinations selected by photograph", and "destinations taken from a vCard". 

Let's start with "PersonalPOI". I didn't get anywhere with this using the German website utility (reference http://www.volkswagen.de/de/navigation.html )

On to "gps-pictures". Here's a screen shot of my "gps-pictures":










These were both jpg files that I created using the tool provided at the above referenced site. The process is you upload a jpg of your choice to the site, you add an address using their utility, it lets you confirm the location using something like a google maps display, and then you save the jpg and it downloads again. You end up with a jpg that has a location encoded into it.


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## scooterabc (Aug 7, 2012)

Let's look at the Picture Navigation Destination selection capability. After pressing the NAV button, you press DEST to enter a destination. You get a choice of touch buttons include one that says SD Card. Select the SD card. At that point you will be given a screen _EITHER_ of your Picture destinations or your vCARD destinations. The choice of which you get is a toggle at the top of whichever screen you land on. In this example, I was taken to my Pictures destinations and my display looked like this:










What you see is an image showing the two JPG files corresponding to those in my pictures directory shown from the screen shot in the previous post. 

See the little icon that looks like a business card on the top bar to the right of "Search" and to the left of the back arrow? That's the toggle button to go from picture navigation to vCARD navigation. If you press the little card it will go into the other mode, described in next post.

You also see two pictures in the display. Both of these pictures were created using the tool at the above referenced German site as described above. THE PICTURES IN THIS EXAMPLE are arbitrary - more commonly one would use a picture of a friend, for example, and their address. I used a picture of a flasher relay from a 1967 Mercedes and a picture of a stuffed animal with a bottle of rum and a can of coke. Each of those images were linked with a location as described in the previous post.

Touching one of the pictures yields the following display:










In this example I touched the picture of the flasher relay and got a detail picture of that. On the detail screen you can press the info button and it will show the actual destination, or you can just tell it to start.


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## scooterabc (Aug 7, 2012)

Now let's go to the vCARD method related to the "destinations" folder. 

Here's a screen shot of the files contained in my "destinations" folder:










As you see, there are four vCard files.

The first file was created using the utility at the above referenced German website. It functions. The second (Casey) and fourth (Lisa) were individual vCard files exported one at a time from my GMAIL clients. The third file (contacts) was an experiment exporting multiple contacts from my GMAIL clients into a single file.

All three files exported from GMAIL failed to work. I have not yet researched why.

More to come? Any interest with anyone out there?


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## martinelles (Feb 10, 2012)

scooterabc said:


> Now let's go to the vCARD method related to the "destinations" folder.
> 
> Here's a screen shot of the files contained in my "destinations" folder:
> 
> ...


Absolutely!!!! I dont like using the interface on the RNS-510 headunit to type addresses for every one i want to save.

Thanks for the hard work


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## GeoVDub (Oct 17, 2011)

Agreed, thank you for the run through. I may delve into this a bit further, entering destinations is a PITA at times.


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## MC17 (Apr 6, 2014)

*making usable SD card vcard entries on a Mac*

(2013 Beetle, RNS-315, I believe.)

I have a FAT-32 512MB SD card. The format is factory-original, not done on the Mac. Using a Mac I have created the destinations folder and put one MP3 file in the root directory and three VCF files in the destinations folder. Two of the VCF files were created by the German-language Nav Companion, one was created in the same place but edited to insert a person's name.

When I insert the SD card and access it according to the instruction book, it plays the music but sees "no business cards". I have cleaned off the "dot files" and made sure all the VCF files are in DOS format (CRLF at ends of lines). I do see that the created cards have a lot of decimal places in the longitude, perhaps due to roundoff error somewhere in the Nav Companion. While writing this message I took one more try. I rounded those lumbers off to six decimal places and tried the SD card again. Success! So for posterity, here's an example of a working file. By varying the colored fields I expect I can make as many working files as I want.

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
CATEGORIES:VIP
X-VIPCategory:Misc
ADR;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:;;S Randall Rd 1506;Geneva;;60134;US
X-NAVADDR:;;;;;;;;;
GEO:41.873476;-88.342589
X-Flag:
REV:20140406T202639z
FN;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:Michaels
UID:AddresBookPersistentProvider3
END:VCARD


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## mannlou (Aug 11, 2014)

MC17 said:


> (2013 Beetle, RNS-315, I believe.)
> 
> I have a FAT-32 512MB SD card. The format is factory-original, not done on the Mac. Using a Mac I have created the destinations folder and put one MP3 file in the root directory and three VCF files in the destinations folder. Two of the VCF files were created by the German-language Nav Companion, one was created in the same place but edited to insert a person's name.
> 
> ...





I just placed ALL of my contacts unintentionally into the SD card by exporting a few with addresses one by one from my iPhone to my gmail account. It's fine by me and it seems to have the addresses there. I know at one point i was synching contacts via Outlook for work on a PC so that may have something to dow with it. 

Also, music was just moved over from my old iTunes account into the root folder and most of them seem to be there. some could not for some reason.


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