Garmin OS Discoverer

[+tarmacjohn]

Hi

I am thinking of getting the complete UK Garmin OS Discoverer for my Oregon. 2 questions spring to mind.

1. Do I really need it, is it going to help with caching.

2. Where is the cheapest place to purchase, I have found £180.

 

Thanks

 

John

[+Unobtainium]

If you don't need large chunks in one go, try this out.

[+Rifty]

I'm a discoverer user and wouldn't be without it - great to be able to see from an os map where a cache lies in relation to the landscape. Many a time, before the discoverer, we'd be on the wrong side of a wall etc

 

If the whole of the uk isn't needed, try one of the regions. I use Northern England and it is literally that : Midlands up to Scotland. Ideal !

[+kevenh]

I hope this is still relevant and on topic!

 

Has any one looked at using OS OpenData?

 

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/opendata/

 

Is it useful to us?

[+needaxeo]

I hope this is still relevant and on topic!

 

Has any one looked at using OS OpenData?

 

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/opendata/

 

Is it useful to us?

 

Well yes and no. It's lots of free data, but it isn't the 1:25k or 1:50k OS raster stuff that costs the big £ and that satmap and garmin et al are selling for their handhelds.

 

opendata does have the 1:250k and 1:1million stuff (which, if I understand correctly, is also included with OS discoverer. For the whole country regardless of what region(s) you buy)

 

It's also the stuff that is free with satmap's GPS too I believe. In theory, these maps you could get free anyway. In practise you might need to convert them to some proprietary format (and to get the same functionality, sort out whatever postcode and other searching they have, and maybe turn by turn routing too - some or all of which has been done by the folk that do free maps anyway)

 

1:250k is usually the scale of the common or garden road atlas everyone had in their glovebox before sat nav started to replace them.

 

What the OS opendata has at lower scales is a new vector based district map. It's not really detailed in the way the 1:50k and 1:25k stuff is.

 

How useful is it for geocaching? Well, I'm in the position of trying to geocache with a Streetpilot III that's like carrying a small house brick, has a street based map that has no detail off road and literally chews through batteries. It makes no difference to finding caches, it's just a bit inconvenient.

 

Enter the Dakota 10/20, you only need 2 batteries instead of 6 and they last far longer, it's lighter, it does paperless geocaching, it's £200. But just as I'm about to click 'buy now' I realise it has no maps at all worth talking about.

 

A sat nav with no maps can cost as little as £80. So it's kind of depressing when you realise the maps nearly double the price of the unit and there really is no middle ground, you can spend £80 for no maps or £200 for still no maps, or £350 for the OS discoverer or in a double whammy, if you can't afford maps when you buy your Dakota they'll happily fleece you out of another £50+ if you buy the unit first and the maps later. Or you can lose even more money if you're daft enough to think "Well I'll buy the South today, and get the others if/when I need them"

 

Worse, you aren't actually buying the map as such, you're buying the map for either an individual sat nav, or a particular brand of Sat nav.

 

So, imo opendata isn't really what was needed here. We didn't really need free OS maps (free maps exist anyway) We'd be better with reasonably priced and reasonably licensed OS digital maps. That's what they should have fought crown copyright to get.

 

So I could buy a digital map from them at a reasonable cost, for use on whatever I want, my PC software, my GPSr or whatever. The OS might have even welcomed it then, if it had helped their business rather than trying to undermine it by making stuff free (not the least because their only idea seems to be that you can have maps on the internet that developers could innovate with, but the internet was already full of maps from MS, google, and that even includes the 1:50k and 1:25k OS ones)

 

e.g If you could get a Dakota 20 for £200 or a Dakota 20 with OS maps for £250, it'd be a no-brainer - indeed, in the UK it'd probably make little sense to sell it without the maps, that's how it should be imo.

 

But do you need them in the first place? Well, if we split using a GPS for geocaching into 3 sections where you might use maps

 

1. Navigating to the first cache. Whether you go to a local one or drive somewhere, chances are this perhaps where turn by turn routing, the city navigator and 1:250k stuff is the most useful. The OS opendata and economies of scale for car sat nav pretty much make this stuff cheap now anyway. So it isn't surprising that OS Discoverer includes it, but it's not really worth buying OS discoverer for it.

 

So, it's kind of useful if your handheld did it, but its not the end of the world.

 

2. Navigating from cache to cache. This is (arguably) where the OS discoverer stuff really comes in. As folk say, so you can see the caches you intend to get in relation to the footpaths, woods, cliffs, rivers and so on between you and them. So you can spot you need to walk to a bridge rather than try to walk in a straight line over a river you didn't realise was there.

 

Yes, it must be great having this on your GPS, but, to me, it's a very expensive solution unless you're traipsing over vast swathes of GB.

 

If you are typically going to be walking or maybe cycling around a set number of caches on a set of footpaths that you can see on one page of streetmap or google. Well, you could probably plan your route before you went (which the sensible are going to do anyway) your gps will still have the waypoints for each cache to guide you along the route. This scale is probably within the realms of using mobile atlas creator too.

 

So, though it seems nice to have, it's not really necessary.

 

3. Finding the cache. This is, at first glance, where you might think the OS map helps, but I'd beg to differ.

 

The 1:50k or 1:25k map isn't actually that detailed after all. Typically you'll zoom in as far as you can and, by sort of assuming that the GPS is telling you where you are, and where the cache is, you walk trying to get the 2 dots to meet (obviously it isn't that accurate IRL, but that's the basic principle) at which point you then look for a suitable hiding place perhaps using the hint to guide you.

 

At this point a map doesn't really help that much, because at this scale they don't have the level of detail to help. At this scale the OS stuff would just be a blurry mess (but even if it were a vector map that would be a bit of a misnomer, there's no extra detail when you zoom in)

 

In short, one pixel on the OS map is probably telling you less about where the cache is than the GPS is (modulo the accuracy of the unit)

 

The aerial photography on google maps et al is probably closer to being useful, but if you're stood in a field you can most likely see there's a tree over there and a fence over there yourself by the time you're at this point, so birdseye seems a bit of a gimmick (and the fish fingers aren't that clever either )

 

So, imho, the OS Discoverer stuff is really about planning / following routes, off road getting from cache to cache, navigating between them. It seems way, way overpriced for its actual usefulness to me. But not only that, as such, it makes the products the maps are available for seem either ridiculously expensive or kinda pointless too as they end up without maps at all (or very basic ones)

 

If you don't need the map why bother with the £200 GPS that doesn't have a map when you can get an £80 one that doesn't have it? Yes, ok, one answer might be paperless I guess (or "you can use free maps") but it's still making me reluctant to buy a new GPS at all...