On Tue, 21 Mar 2006 23:53:41 -0600, "Mike Henry"
wrote:
"John Martin" wrote in message
roups.com...
Mike Henry wrote:
"Al A." wrote in message
. ..
snip
Hi Eric,
The website is correct, it won't work indoors, the signal is heavily
attenuated by most construction. I generally use mine in the woods. How
the new england woods compare to where you are, is hard to guess. I am
snip
Some GPSs have better sensitivity than others. The Garmin Nuvi 350 will
lock onto satellites inside our 2-story house, apparently due to its SiRF
receiver, which I gather is a fairly new development in the GPS market.
I
do know that it works a heck of a lot better than the Earthmate GPS units
I'd used previously.
Mike
I've had a Garmin Vista C for about 6 months now. It will often lock
on indoors.
My only bitch about them - other than battery life - is the cost of the
maps. The map that comes with it shows interstates and state routes,
but not much more detail than that. For traveling, you can buy
Garmin's detailed road map with destination service info - for about a
hundred bucks. Want topo information but without the destination info?
- that's about a hundred bucks. Want more detailed topo maps for just
the national parks and some other areas? - that's about a hundred
bucks. Per region - east, central and west. Want nautical charts? -
those are a bit more. They give you a pretty wide range of charts on
the CD, but it costs you to unlock each area. Want maps for non-US
areas? They've got 'em - for a price.
I've got some older DeLorme topographical CDs, but of course the Garmin
unit won't accept them. At least not that I've been able to find.
Yet.
That's a major annoyance. So far as I can tell the Nuvi has a full map of
the US and Canada built into it and the map seems to be detailed down to all
the minor roads and tons of POIs like food, hotels, recreation, etc.
Updates to the US/Canada or new maps to other continents/geographical areas
apparently require the same sort of fees that you discuss.
Have you tried the Garmin GPS newsgroup to see if anyone else has figured
out a way to convert other databases?
Mike
I saw some do-it-yourself stuff a while back. My Garmin is
just one generation too old for map uploads, so I didn't
bookmark it. A quick search turned up this:
http://www.gpsinformation.org/adamne.../gpsmapper.htm
I can't remember now if that was the exact page or not, but
there are some free programs out there to create your own
maps for uploading.
--
Leon Fisk
Grand Rapids MI/Zone 5b
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