Re: travel guide reccomendations


"Thornhill" <seth.levi@xxxxxxxxx> kirjoitti viestissä:1185293412.206885.244910@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I've never thought of using GPS. Have any hardware and software
recommendations?

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I can give a few guidelines. I assume you don't drive a car in Europe. You need the device when visiting interesting places in Europe - mostly in towns. You reach places by public transportation (typically requires some research for a selection of the route and medium of public transportation) or on foot.

1. there are more or less on two commercial institutions digitizing maps in global cover for recreational customers: Navteq and TeleAtlas. As I see it there should be little concern about comparative quality issues - roughly speaking, they are "equally good". Almost all low end manufactures equip their gadgets by products of either the two cartographers.

2. buy a hand-set. a model which have long running times between change/recharge of batteries. 10 hours or more guarantee decent performance in this respect. Nowadays receivers are pretty powerful. The good thing is that they remain operational and don't lose the reception to satellites even in densely built streets. The disadvantage may be that they consume more electricity.

3. for hikers I prefer a plotter which is running by dry cell batteries (typically a couple of AA-size batteries keep the device alive); rechargeable batteries are handy and economical. The plotter doesn't have to be very fast because for walkers the re-draw capacity doesn't have to be that high (fast picture panning). Batteries last longer.

4. have a map covering "all" of Europe. Actually for some Western European countries there is not necessarily full support. Vendors and manufacturers know the effective region (which is almost all Western Europe, Greece typically being one exception). Nowadays more and more of Eastern Europe is also covered.

5. buy the plotter which have a port to a flash card (you may later buy other sorts of maps like topographic maps).

6. a vendor might be willing to sell the most expensive turbo models but by far most users can go by with decent machinery costing something like 300 dollars the map of Europe installed.


Well established shops can consult you so that you buy a piece suitable for you. Technology is advancing fast in the gps industry. My garmin etrex legend (with a black and white display, 8 MB non-expandable memory, a poor receiver and no port for external antenna) which I bought four years ago is so archaic that I don't use it for anything anymore but newer machinery has taken over. Note that today's garmin etrex legend has only the name in common with the 2003 machinery.

For instance Garmin has a wide selection for decent street navigation. Naturally there are lots of other players around.

.

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