Phone charger to power my Oregon?

[wahoowad]

Can I use my mini-USB phone charger to power my Oregon 300 while traveling in my vehicle? I looked around and saw some conflictng info on this. My phone/charger is a motorola if that matters. Just didn't want to try it and hit my gps'r with some wrong voltage.

 

edit - I continued to search, realized that I *can* use my vehicle cell phone charger to power the Oregon. I had to set the interface setting to Spanner and it worked. What is the difference between leaving my unit in Spanner setting or the default Serial setting? Why not leave to Spanner all the time?

Edited September 4, 2009 by wahoowad

[Ken in Regina]

"Spanner" setting sends the GPS data stream out the USB port so you could use it as a receiver for your laptop with something like Garmin's Mobile PC or DeLorm Street Atlas, etc. I do this with my eTrex Legend HCx and my netbook sometimes. I have four good GPS receivers, two USB and two Bluetooth, and the Legend is better than all four of them, including the expensive Garmin GPS10x Bluetooth receiver.

 

Probably a side effect of the Spanner setting is that it makes the USB port act like a real USB port so it will use the power leads (serial connectors have no power leads).

 

...ken...

[+Walts Hunting]

The short answer is yes. Set it for Spanner and it asks you each time if you want to go into mass storage mode. Say no and you are fine. Any USB style connection will power it. However it does not charge the batteries. I use an iGo setup for my car since I have different devices I use.