Mobile phones and WAAS

[Andronicus]

I have been using my HTC Vogue as my geocaching gps. It has an internal GPS made by Qualcom (gpsONE) with no WAAS. It can be frusterating when it says that the cache is 2m north, then without moving it says 10m south.

 

I guess my question is, is it going to significantly improve my accuracy to get a bluetooth GPS that is WAAS enabled?

 

Also, I live in Canada (may be a significant factor) at about 51 deg North

[+RonFisk]

I have been using my HTC Vogue as my geocaching gps. It has an internal GPS made by Qualcom (gpsONE) with no WAAS. It can be frusterating when it says that the cache is 2m north, then without moving it says 10m south.

 

I guess my question is, is it going to significantly improve my accuracy to get a bluetooth GPS that is WAAS enabled?

 

Also, I live in Canada (may be a significant factor) at about 51 deg North

Myself, I'd consider a good stand alone GPS and continue to use my cell phone as a phone. A phone can never perform as well as a GPS in doing what a GPS is designed to do. You might think about getting a Colorado, Oregon, DeLorme PN-40 GPS or if you don't need paperless, a Garmin GPSMAP-60CSx

[Andronicus]

Here what you say about a stand alone, but my HTC Vogue can do everything from loging into geocaching.com, downloading the .loc files, running geocaching software, etc. etc. It really does everything I need for geocaching. So, I would like to not "upgrade" to a larger second unit that I need to connect to my PC to get .loc files onto it etc. It is all about convinience.

 

By the way, Canadagps.com has a nice WAAS bluetooth GPSr (-159dBm <3m accuracy) for $60 +$9 shipping (Canadian Dollars) (Holux M-1000)

 

All the numbers suggest much more accuracy with WAAS (10-15m vs <3m), I guess I would like to know if that acctualy translates into real world accuracy (trees ect)

[+naviguesser74]

I use a US GlobsalSat BT GPSr with a Palm Treo 700P. (I use it with TomTom, too, and it is much better than the TomTom-supplied GPSr.) Amazingly accurate and sensitive. So, I recommend that. But don't you need some software on the phone that can receive the GPS data and make it intelligible? On the Treo, I have a number of GPS apps, but the one that is best for geocaching is GeoNiche.

[Andronicus]

The M-1000 Support NMEA0183 data protocol, which the HTC Vogue uses. As for software, I have google maps, and several other great freeware GPS software packages that I am not allowed to mention here.