Hello (GPS) World
Up until last week, I wasn’t much of a GPS guy. At last week’s OGC meetings, my rental car had an onboard navigation system. Add to that a colleague of mine introducing me to geocaching, and I was hooked.
So when I got home (and caught up on sleep), I started my research. The best deal I found was the Magellan eXplorist 500, for under $200 CAD. Since this was quite the deal, I picked one up for my brother as well.
So far, this looks like quite the GPS device. I like the colour display as well as the SD card capability. Plus the built-in geocaching application is useful.
Things that are kinda weird: the AC power adapter is not included. So, unless/until you buy it, you have no way to initially charge (and use) the Li-Ion rechargeable battery. Interesting. Fortunately, the package included a free AC adapter as a mail in offer (which takes 6-8 weeks). So, for now, I’m stuck with using 3 AAA batteries.
Other stuff:
- I’ll most likely buy the cigarette lighter power adapter
- I’m guessing a latest and greatest version of the device is coming out soon, hence the wicked deal
- I can already envision the hacks I can come up with to whip up some cool GML output of Points of Interests, routes and the like
- Maps: the device comes with basemaps of North America, so I’ll need some more detailed maps. I found MapSend Direct Route version 3.0. Which now becomes a question of capacity. Since I have a 512MB SD Card from my digital camera, I am using that as capacity for now. So I’ll initially load Ontario as my main area, and add areas as needed.
So it looks like I have a data management task at hand. Man, it would be nice if these were webmaps 🙂 If anyone out there has any experiences with these units, I’d be interested in learning, so feel free to comment.
