Entropy512

The military already has their own separate signals which are better than the civilian signals. Most of the improvements we're seeing are effectively giving civilians access to signals that contain some of the features the military has had since the beginning (such as dual-frequency reception). As to taxing GPS - the system would need some major changes to make it taxable, and if there were an attempt to charge fees for it, Galileo would regain momentum. (Probably the number 1 driving reason for killing off SA was to reduce Galileo's momentum. Attempting to charge for GPS would refuel the Galileo efforts.)

If you don't need the camera, you can purchase a Garmin Oregon 450, or Oregon 450t for less money. Plus, there is a $50 rebate from Garmin right now. Given that there are 24k topos available for free from gpsfiledepot.com, I would recommend the 450 over the 450t - the extra $100 or so for 100k topos just isn't worth it.

Copy it to the memory card using a USB card reader. That said, since you can't remove the memory card without removing the batteries, in the case of Oregons it's a lot easier to just load stuff onto the card via USB. That $60 software is for those who want to load raster data into units that don't support the new Garmin Custom Maps feature. If it's a KMZ from gpsfiledepot.com, it almost surely is generated with all of the Garmin Custom Maps restrictions in mind. (Other KMZs aren't guaranteed in this regard.)

Oregons had a firmware update that allowed them to read any IMG file, not just the 3-4 "fixed names" they did before. Thus you can put one map set into each IMG file and the Oregon can load them all. Mapsource will only write to gmapsupp.img, but once this is written you can rename it. Dakotas always had this capability. Not sure about Colorados.

There is NO WAY you'll be getting rid of a Nuvi with an eMap. The eMap is on the order of 8 years old - it's ancient. It was my first GPS receiver out of college (graduated in 2002). It does NOT do onboard routing from maps, and you cannot store maps in it without a proprietary memory chip that only Garmin sold (and is probably impossible to find these days). This unit's frustrations (in terms of what you got for the price you paid for memory and proprietary cables) is what drove me away from Garmin for years. Their newer units are completely different now - more use of standard memory and interfaces than anyone else. For road routing, even the most basic Nuvi is way beyond the eMap. The eMap cannot perform routing internally, and when you generate a route in MapSource, it only goes "intersection to intersection" and doesn't take into account curved roads.

True. I fix the files up in GSAK first (though you can do it with a text editor too if you know what to search/replace). I don't expect DeLorme to reliably fix their GPX interpreter in firmware 2.8 or on the PN-60 either. Not their fault, since Groundspeak has made GPX for pocket queries is a bit of moving target. Even if DeLorme gets it perfect on the rollout, this website might change one tiny substring in PQs the next day -- and we're back to GSAK macros. Um, it's not that much of a moving target... Other GPS receivers seem to have no trouble dealing with whatever changes are made. I'll admit I update my unit's firmware pretty often, but it never seems to be "behind" in terms of PQ compatibility.

To receive the "legacy" signals, no. But you will not see the accuracy improvements offered by the addition of the L2C signal without a new chipset. The reason for the second frequency is because one of the primary contributors to GPS error (ionospheric delay) is frequency dependent. If you can compare the arrival times of signals transmitted at the same time on two frequencies, you can determine what the total delay was. So using L2C in addition to the existing L1 C/A signal allows for removal of ionospheric error.

Can anyone back this up? Might we not get a better quality product if it was made in the USA. Based upon what? The majority of the assembly, the parts that really count, are assembled robotically. Robots don't know whether they're American, Taiwanese, Mexican or Chinese. On a car forum I go to, someone posted that they would only ever buy a Subaru Impreza or Forester, never an Outback or Legacy. His reasoning? The former 2 are built in Japan, the latter in Indiana, and his feeling was that "Japanese people have smaller hands, so they can get into everywhere & assemble things better." I'm not kidding. This whole "where it was assembled has a significant bearing on the quality" idea is outdated. Every company knows that if they don't put out quality, they will lose money and customers. The competition is too harsh. The funny thing about this one - A lot of people feel that the US-built Outbacks/Legacies are more "solid" than the Japan-built Forester/Impreza. This is more of a function of their design than where they were built - the Impreza/Forester are fundamentally lower-end/cheaper vehicles than the more expensive Outback/Legacy. It's possible to get good quality from a Chinese contract manufacturer, if the contract specifies a certain level of quality control. Even Apple's products which typically have a high quality reputation are made by Chinese contract manufacturers.

It depends on your data source. The USGS orthoimagery (the best available for DeLorme units as of a year ago) is pretty low resolution - 1 meter/pixel I think. Most states have significantly better aerial imagery. New York State is 2 feet/pixel at worst, 1 foot/pixel in most cases, and 6 inches/pixel in some areas. The orthoimagery is available for free from the New York GIS website, and can be loaded into Garmin Oregons/Dakotas using gdalwarp + mapc2mapc.

NatGeo probably hasn't updated their tech support answers to reflect the very recent development of Garmin Custom Maps. A workflow that would probably work: GIMP to rasterize the PDF (load it in GIMP, tweak the DPI to get the desired resolution, save as PNG) If the map is "collared" you will want to crop these You can potentially do some editing of the PDF (removing legends and such to produce something more readable on the GPS) by loading the PDF in Inkscape instead of GIMP. You'll probably have to use Inkscape's "ungroup" function 4093297427342869 times before you can do anything useful though. MAPC2MAPC to georeference and tile the resulting PNG

gpsfiledepot.com for free 24k topos It's possible to get routable street maps based on OSM data, but these can have severe errors in some areas Garmin BirdsEye isn't too expensive, you can also load arbitrary raster data in with the Garmin Custom Maps function. There are tools to greatly ease this workflow for some types of data such as MAPC2MAPC (look around in Garmin's developer forums.)

What terrible journalism! Did they do no research? GPS receivers put 0 load on the satellites and infrastructure. GPS receivers are just that - receivers. The satellites put out the same signal and are under the same load whether there are 50 million receivers or just one. Also "aging quickly" is also completely inaccurate. The average life of a GPS satellite has been around 2 times longer than the designed life! Also, the current infrastructure as only been operational for less than three years. Now is hardly time for an infrastructure overhaul. They're just adding the next-generation satellites. "There are 24 satellites that provide GPS data" is also inaccurate. GPS needs 24 satellites for whole-earth coverage. Currently, there are 31 operational satellites (minus any temporarily disabled satellites). The launch of IIF-1 will be #32. There are also a few spares on orbit. "...working in tandem to pinpoint the location of GPS-enabled devices around the world." Wrong again. It's the receiver that pinpoints its location; not the satellite. "The upgrade process will have to be seamless, so the satellites will be replaced one by one." The launch schedule is more driven by an as-needed basis with consideration of the maximum number of supported operational SVs (32). They're not going to replace a perfectly good older satellite just because they have a new one ready to go. Some other things to note: While the new Block IIF satellites should boost our accuracy as I believe they have more powerful transmitters (I'd have to double check that), the real benefit to us will be the addition of a second civilian signal. However, this won't be a benefit to us until there are significantly more of these new satellites being operational and we have new receivers which can receive and use this new signal. Just trying to dispel some GPS untruths. I believe even the more powerful "safety of life" signal is a new code sequence - existing receivers won't be able to receive it. However it's gonna rock when L2C goes live and receivers that support it come out. Bye bye ionospheric error!

That and the lack of voice prompts are the main deficiencies of the Garmin when driving. In my area, the Oregon is OK because traffic isn't too bad. If driving in the LA area - you really need the large display of a Nuvi/TomTom and it needs to be dashtop or windshield mounted.

There are a lot of variables here. If you have a plain old GPSMAP 60, that's an old unit with a very insensitive chipset. (I didn't think those supported WAAS???) Tree cover can hurt accuracy. Obstructions can too. If you have obstructions to the east and west of you, leading to only satellites on a north/south arc visible, the errors in the east/west direction will increase. If you don't have WAAS corrections applied, satellite constellation geometry can bias errors. Even with WAAS corrections, satellite geometry isn't always optimal. This is why precision survey-grade GPS units take VERY long (many hours) samples - some of the techniques they use absolutely require each satellite used to traverse a good portion of the sky. It's also why the new waypoint averaging feature of Garmin Oregon/Dakota units reccommends waiting at least 90 minutes between each sample.

IMO the Oregon's driving mode is sufficient and not "lousy", but it isn't optimal either. For the price of City Navigator maps you can purchase a Nuvi that will do the job much better. Compared to a Nuvi it might be considered lousy, but as someone who has used various versions of DeLorme Street Atlas Handheld, a PN-20, and a PN-40, I can tell you - the Oregon's road navigation features are far ahead of the competition.

My son has the driod and under the app it says if you get caught using it you will be banned from the site. I do not know why?? were are the other threads????? Which app? I'm guessing that the one you found is a "Screen scraper" style one like GCzII for Windows Mobile which violates the Groundspeak TOU. If you use such an app (hint: if it's not an official app and can do "live" searching for caches, it likely violates the Groundspeak TOU) you can potentially get banned. There should be other apps that allow you to save a Pocket Query (requires Premium membership - WORTH THE MONEY!) and then load that PQ within the App, eliminating the need for "Screen scraping". Also, in the future, you need to specify what operating system, not which manufacturer, since many manufacturers are now making both Windows Mobile and Android based phones. (HTC is a longtime Windows Mobile handset manufacturer, and has more recently partnered with Google for hardware design of Android devices.) I assume you mean Droid Incredible, since the regular Droid is made by Motorola. Edit: There are a few threads in this forum which cover geocaching on Android devices. I haven't read either of them, but they should be easy to find since they explicitly mention Android in the subject line.

Agree on never wanting to go back to a non-compass unit. Also, I've found that with freshly charged NiMHs, it seems like for the first 15-30 minutes of use they have a higher voltage than normal and will flatten out after that. Or at least that's my guess why I need to recalibrate frequently at the start of a hike and then don't have to re-cal afterwards.

Agreed - my wife thought I had wasted money on the fancy LaCrosse charger. However - suddenly the batteries last longer, some old batteries that I thought were no good got easily refreshed, They don't get hot while charging. I am very satisfied. One of the big flaws with cheaper chargers that don't have independent charge channels is that if one battery in the set is slightly weaker than the others, it will frequently not get fully charged because the other cells will trigger charge termination. The battery's charge level will get farther and farther from the rest, resulting to potential cell reversal when the battery fully discharges before the other cells are close to being discharged. Cell reversal = BAD - the cell will be pretty much shot at this point. A charger with independent circuits for each cell will top off each cell independently, eliminating the slow buildup of charge level deltas across the pack.

1) Any Ultra-Low Self Discharge (aka precharged aka hybrid) NiMH. Make sure the listed capacity is 2000 mAh or 2100 mAh - although so far unlike non-ULSD cells, there aren't "cheapo" ULSDs with pitiful capacity on the market yet 2) MaHa MH-C9000 is great, but LaCrosse BC-700 is more than enough for nearly anyone and $20 cheaper ($30 for the LaCrosse, $50 for the MaHa 3) No, car power supply will stop battery discharge, but will not recharge batteries.

Same here. Tag the find, detailed log at home.

4GB 8GB - and it is MicroSD, not MiniSD No - I use a purpose built automotive unit for driving. While I have a purpose-built auto GPS, I do sometimes get lazy about pulling it out and use the Garmin instead. I have a generic "Speck" brand car power adapter that is designed for Nuvis/TomToms but works fine with the Oregon, and also charges HTC phones without problems. (My phone is an AT&T Tilt.) IIRC, Garmin chargers will power HTC devices well, but not vice versa. (HTC devices ground one pin on the mini-USB connector, Garmin ties it to ground via a specific resistance. HTC devices treat that resistance as a ground, but Garmins treat a straight ground as "not a charger" I think.) Powergenix NiZn - no more compass calibration! I use ultra low self discharge (aka pre-charged, aka "hybrid") NiMH cells with a MaHa MH-C9000 charger. What's this about no more compass cal? Is the compass known to go un-cal with NiMHs? That might explain the one big frustration I have with my unit (compass loses cal frequently.) Free topos at gpsfiledepot.com. OSM if you need routables. Topos from gpsfiledepot Garmin Custom Maps rasters generated myself I do happen to have a copy of City Navigator, but most people are fine without it

Cool, I have seen maps made with Version 5.0 and they looked good. I had no problems with Topo 8 on an Intel Atom based netbook, so it's not a resource hog. (If it's too much for your machine, you can get that Acer Aspire One nettop for $200...)

No, there is an Oregon 400t, Oregon 400i and Oregon 400c. No 400.... The point is we need to know which EXACT units the OP wants to compare. Only differences between the 400t/i/c and the 300 were: Preloaded maps Extra internal memory For 95% of people, the free topos at gpsfiledepot.com are better than the preloaded maps on the "t" units. The i/c units might be good if you need the kind of maps preloaded into them. The changes in firmware to allow loading of multiple IMG files eliminated the benefits of large internal memory (compared to a large MicroSD card) Differences between the 300 and 450 were covered above. The 450 is the way to go these days.

Getting many caches at a time is exactly what PQs are for... gc.com upped the limit on caches per PQ to something ridiculous. Used to be 200, now it's *at least* 500. The Garmin Communicator approach only lets you send one cache at a time to my knowledge, not 500...

a mississippi map off of filedepot Is the extension of the map .img? Or is it a Garmin Custom Maps KMZ file?