PREMIUM TMC services on PC5200PT / PC5200PTpro / PC5200 Ford units

Here is some information about the various PC5200 units to clean up some mysteries about these lovely but long (huh almost 10 years?) discontinued units, every bit is only for educational purposes.

So you (or preferably somebody else before you) paid extra to get access to premium (so called PayTMC) TMC services just to find that your PC5200PT or PC5200PTpro unit wont connect to the desired TMC service. And this is rather unpleasantly denoted by a big ugly red X over some blurry coins in the list of TMC stations where you wanted to see a solid green tick.



Well this is because it has never been emphasised that PT & PTpro units will only pickup V-Traffic (France), ITIS (UK) and TMCpro (Germany) besides the freely available un-encrypted TMC channels and this is the end of the very short list of the officially supported premium TMC services.



To be fair SUNA TMC is supported in Australia by the 'Ford specific' PC5200 units.



Otherwise all PC5200 units can receive all un-encrypted TMC channels.



Here is the quick break down of the 7 'different' PC5200 units ever produced. Important to mention that they are all hardware identical but they came with different firmware to target different markets/applications. Interesting to mention that the factory did not bother with separate stickers for payTMC (PT) models, they just attached a new sticker with the same serial number overlapping the original sticker after they flashed the TMC keys into the unit.

PC5200/00 or /40 (ANNRR200-00) - Base model
PC5200PT/40 (ANNRR200-10) - Same as above +capability to receive V-traffic, ITIS and TMCpro
PC5200PRO/40 (ANNRR200-20) - Fleet version, without the fleet hardware it has the same capabilities as the pc5200/xx
PC5200PTpro (ANNRR200-30) - Fleet version, same as PC5200PRO/40 +capacity to receive V-traffic, ITIS and TMCpro
PC5200/99 (ANNRR200-40) - Australian version of PC5200, same features as the base PC5200 but slightly different config (keyboard lock, speed limits, colours etc.)
PC5200 Ford (ANNRR200-50) - Australian version, same as PC5200/99, but 'designed for' Ford FG MK1 falcons, most importantly it has SUNA TMC keys for Australia
PC5200TSN (ANNRR200-??) - TSN=TruckSpecificNavigation, Designed for European heavy vehicles, significantly different software & slightly different map format

In this topic we are interested in the 3 models capable of decoding commercial/premium TMC services (pc5200PT & PC5200PTpro & Ford units).
With the right tricks any PC5200 can be converted to any other pc5200 model (more about this later), but mostly you may want to have the premium PT models. I managed to cross-flash the base PC5200 to the Ford version, the base PC5200 to PC5200PTpro, the Ford version into the PTpro version and the PTpro version back to the Ford version, but any can be flashed to any with a special firmware. Moving between pro and non-pro models is trickier as the firmware is picky.

I am looking for any PC5200PT/40 unit to buy/swap/trade, it can even be bricked, broken, faulty, malfunctioning anything as long as the flash chip is on the board. It is really difficult to come by and me fool I sold the only one I had...

Anyway after some poking around I managed to access Navteq/Here TMC in AUS on my PC5200PTpro and PC5200 Ford units with some educated guesses towards the TMC keys.



Similar can be done on any PC5200PT / PTpro units in Eur with any premium TMC services as long as the country has TMC support in the maps (usually it means there is some unencoded TMC in that country too so this makes the whole thing not so exciting..). This is a requirement as the map has to contain the location tables and location codes for the given country otherwise TMC wont work regardless of the TMC key.

This brings us to the latest and last Eur maps for the PC5200 series from TomTom (2014-15 final edition), the list of countries with TMC support:

A Austria ~100% detailed street network & house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
B Belgium ~100% detailed street network & house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
CH Switzerland ~100% detailed street network, ~99% house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
CZ Czech Republic ~100% detailed street network, ~44% house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
DE German ~100% detailed street network & house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
DK Denmark ~100% detailed street network & house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
E Spain ~100% detailed street network, ~96% (+3%) house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
EST Estonia ~100% detailed street network, ~100% (+28%) house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
F France ~100% detailed street network, ~96% (+4%) house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
FIN Finland ~100% detailed street network, ~99% house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
I Italy ~100% detailed street network, ~88% house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
N Norway ~100% detailed street network, ~100% house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
NL Netherlands ~100% detailed street network, ~100% house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
S Sweden ~100% detailed street network, ~97% house numbers, Post-codes and TMC
SK Slovakia ~100% detailed street network, ~45% house numbers, TMC

Please note there is no TMC for the UK with this release. - it means for me that UK users with PT devices are screwed and unable to take advantage of their superior devices... I suspect licensing issues in the background. Assuming they want TMC the only way around is to stick to some older maps (probably from Navteq) which is a cumbersome compromise...

anybody with pc5200PT/40 or pc5200PTpro units in the above countries desperate for some premium TMC services (besides V-traffic, TMCpro and ITIS) could get them by tweaking the original TMC keys contained by every PC5200PT and PTpro units.

questions welcome :)

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