Colorful, accurate, but slow
Written: Jul 08 '00 (Updated Jul 09 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Bright large display, street level mapping
Cons: slow refresh, to large for hiking
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| cweissha's Full Review: Garmin StreetPilot ColorMap Car GPS Receiver |
The StreetPilot is a GPS receiver with 12 channels. Since it picks up the public GPS signal (broadcast from government satellites) the use of this device is free after the cost of purchase. It cannot function indoors and has trouble in canyons. GPS is more accurate than it used to be, and this receiver, along with most other on the market can receive up to 12 signals from different satellites. The best accuracy that I have seen is 12ft but it is usually less than 20.
It is meant for use in your car and can even be mounted. It is a bit large for hiking, but you can get topo maps and it will show elevation and your lat/long position. Where it really shines is with the optional mapsource street level detail. You have to buy a memory pack (8 or 16MB) and you can load (1 or 2) areas of street level detail into the unit. Within this area you will have every street and lots of businesses. You can search these businesses to find the nearest restaurant, theater, gas, ATM, etc.
There is a route capability so that you can plan a route and have the unit tell you when to turn. However, unless you do this on a computer and download the route into the unit, it can take longer to plan the route than to drive it. This is because of the slow refresh time. Depending on the level of detail and zoom, it can take from 5sec to 30sec to refresh the view. During this refresh there isn't much you can do but wait. While driving the refresh is almost never a problem because you aren't moving fast enough to have to refresh very often. But if you are moving the cursor around looking for something on the map you will spend most of your time waiting for it to re-draw the screen.
The unit can also display the positions of the satellites in the sky, and status about which it is receiving. On this page it displays the accuracy of the current position too. Another somewhat useful display is the trip summary. It is like the trip odometer on your car but shows the average speed, max speed and time driving.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
cweissha
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Member: Chad Weisshaar
Location: Denver
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
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