Sportrac Pro and Maptech Terrain Navigator Questions

[chuska]

Hello

 

I'm brand new to this sport and considering buying the aformentioned products. I have a few questions and would really appreciate it if a few of you could answer my questions.

 

1. Is the Sportrac pro compatible with Terr Nav?

They don't have it listed on their website as a compatible unit.

 

2. If the above question's answer is yes, I assume that it is possible to upload tracks and waypoints to the program to be saved, right? ...and conversly as well?

 

3. Has anyone any comments on the durability of the Sportrac Pro? I plan on using it attached to the handlebars of my motorcycle...among other things.

 

Thanks

 

Tim

[+Night Stalker]

I have a sportrak pro and to date have had really good luck with it. As far as mounting it on a motorcycle I would think you would want some kind of insulation from the vibration to keep it happy. As far as I know Mapsend is the only software that will work with Magellan products. I have the Mapsend Topo software and have been fairly pleased with it. It does not seem quite as accurate as the Garmin software as far as identifying position. It shows my house about 140' west of the actual location, but the fact that it shows my street at all is a surprise. It also compresses better than the Garmin software so you can get larger and more maps on your GPS

[Den-Den and Pi]

quote:

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1. Is the Sportrac pro compatible with Terr Nav? They don't have it listed on their website as a compatible unit.

---

 

Yes, it works fine, for the most part. Under GPS settings, I set it to "NMEA - Map 330". It will upload and download waypoints, but I could not get it to do "real time GPS'ing." That's not a feature I would use anyway, though -- too hard to lug a desktop into the field :-)

 

New Utility for Maptech!

 

One of the annoying things about Maptech is it won't import .loc files from geocaching.com directly. So, I wrote a utility to convert them! To use it, I:

 

1. save each of the .loc files to a different name on the desktop.

 

2. highlight them all and drag them to the utility (also on the desktop)

 

3. it puts them all together and leaves them in the right format.

 

I haven't officially released it yet because it's written in Perl and I just tried a utility called "perl2exe" to make it into a regular program (i.e. you don't need perl to use it). Now I just need to buy "perl2exe" and give it to the world. I've just been hesitating, because I don't want to spend the $50.00 right now :-)

[Den-Den and Pi]

You can't use the actual maps from maptech IN your sportrak -- only the Magellan software works (as is true with any GPS unit or brand, much to my annoyance...) That being said, I'm pretty happy with Mapsend Topo overall in the Sportrak. It's not super accurate, but it works great for getting to and from caches.

 

I use Maptech for my printed maps. Best print quality I've seen by far!

[chuska]

I appreciate you guys answering my questions.

 

As far as the motorcycle handlebar mounts I have found this page

 

http://www.cycoactive.com/gps/gps_mounts_ram.html

 

As for the Ter Nav maps all I really wanted to be able to do was transfer waypoints and points of interest anyway.

 

Thanks Again...

 

tim