Anybody use a GPS navigator in their vehicle?

[Captain Kilowatt]

Well I just picked up a Magellin Roadmate 1412 that was on sale for half price. I have had a Garmin handheld regular GPS for a few years and it was handy for mapping trips and finding places in the woods etc.that you had the coordinates of but this navigator is the bomb. I can't believe how sensitive it is compared to the Garmin HH unit. The Garmin will not RX any signal inside the house unless it is placed in a window and then it is marginal. The Magellin Roadmate will RX the signals anywhere in my house and will track as many as nine or ten satellites while inside.I saw it tracking 15 satellites while on a short drive today.The accuracy is incredible and the voice prompts are great so you rarely need to even look at it.The database of points of interest has over six million entries and having the telephone numbers of the hotels,attractions, local emergency services etc is really neat.Hopefully it will come in handy on a trip I am thinking about taking this summer with the family to Ottawa and beyond.No more left turns when I should have gone straight for me.

[C2]

I heard the US air force has not kept up with the GPS system maintenance and there is a good chance it will fail by 2010...

couple that with BOs pushing the phase out of the laran system, we should be sitting pretty.

[Rob KI6USW]

I have the DeLorme LT-20 and the EarthMate software. I use it with a laptop when I travel. It works pretty well for the money spent - I have no complaint with it.

[Captain Kilowatt]

Originally Posted by C2

I heard the US air force has not kept up with the GPS system maintenance and there is a good chance it will fail by 2010...

couple that with BOs pushing the phase out of the laran system, we should be sitting pretty.

You mean the Loran system? That has been slowly phasing out for several years now but is still maintained as a backup to the GPS system.It uses freqs in the 90-110 KHz range and power levels in the 100Kw -4 Mw range with massive vertical tower radiators. Apparently the GPS system is in fact being upgraded with new satellites and ground stations in the works. A goal of 2013 has been established for the entire program, with incentives offered to the contractors if they can complete it by 2011.

[SR385]

I've had two, a super featurefied Lowrance iWay 500C and now Garmin's cheapest wide screen Nuvi model.

The old one was $600+ or so when I got it and the new one just cost me about $130 or so. The performance of the new one is amazing. It recalculates and calculates the directions an order of magnitude faster than the old one did. It also weighs a few ounces where the old one had an actual hard drive in it and a giant heat sink on the back and weighed a pound or two.

For basic driving, all the bells and whistles were never used so I decided the base model would be fine. The only thing that Garmin has as an upsell feature that annoyed the hell out of me is alphabetizing the 'favorites' list if you can believe it. I didn't know this wasn't already in this one or I would have bought the next one up.

I resent that Garmin has alphabetical sorting of saved lists as a 'feature', it's a no-brainer and something I would assume any list in any software like that would just do.

Outside of that, I really like it.

The most often used feature is if I'm just out for a ride wandering around and finally get sick of driving...just set it to 'home' and it gets me out of wherever I am in the shortest route back.