GPS unit recommendation?

Howdy folks. I'm gong to Italy with my family in June and we'll be
touring a bunch of cities. We'll travel by train which I believe we
already have covered.
I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a compact GPS one can carry around
as a pedestrian.

On Mar 31, 5:54*pm, Justin wrote:
Howdy folks. *I'm gong to Italy with my family in June and we'll be
touring a bunch of cities. *We'll travel by train which I believe we
already have covered.
I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a compact GPS one can carry around
as a pedestrian.


I have seen people use their smart phones.

PeterL wrote:
On Mar 31, 5:54 pm, Justin wrote:

I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a compact GPS one can carry around
as a pedestrian.

I have seen people use their smart phones.

That's probably a very convenient option, but might be the most
expensive, too - unless you're absolutely sure that either your phone
has the maps always on hand (i.e. doesn't need to download them in
Italy) or your mobile plan includes a large, at best unlimited amount of
free Internet traffic in Italy. People have been charged two, three
months' wages for Internet access abroad.

I'd go with a paper map: Easy to operate, lightweight to carry, no
hidden charges, doesn't run out of electricity when needed most and
doesn't annoy with useless chitchat from home. But that wasn't the
question

In Justin
wrote:

I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a compact GPS one can carry
around as a pedestrian.

I carried a Garmin 76CSx loaded with Garmin's "MetroGuide Europe" map
set on a trip to Norway a few years ago when my wife and I did the
Hurtigruten cruise from Bergen to Kirkenes and back.

I'd occasionally turn the receiver on when up on deck just to see where
we were, but I kept it on continuously when we wandered around town at
the various stops we made during the cruise. Most of the towns were so
small that there was no need for even a paper map for navigating, but
the receiver was useful in Bergen and Trondheim.

I was mostly interested in saving the receiver's tracklog which had a
time-stamped record of everywhere we'd been. Comparing the time and
location of records in the tracklog with the timestamp of the photos
from our camera helps us figure out just where we were when we took the
pictures :-)

The receiver's also reasonably useful in the car here in the US when
loaded with Garmin's "City Navigator North America" map set. It doesn't
talk like the car-specific models, but it does just about everything
else.

I doubt that the 76CSx is still in production, but Garmin and all the
other vendors have similar handheld receivers with similar features.

First, decide just what you want the receiver to do for you. Then,
price, size, feature set and map availability will certainly lead you to
a solution.

--
Bert Hyman St. Paul, MN

Justin wrote:
Howdy folks. I'm gong to Italy with my family in June and we'll be
touring a bunch of cities. We'll travel by train which I believe we
already have covered.
I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a compact GPS one can carry around
as a pedestrian.

I have a Garmin Etrex, which I bought for that purpose. Once I mark my
starting point, I can always find my way back there even if narrow streets
make it lose its satellite fix now and then, in which case I only need an
open area to find it again. It does a lot more, too, of course. Except
for those narrow streets, it also shows me the route I've taken, which has
its uses, for instance.
I didn't want a fancy one with maps, because I want a real map as well; it
can't run out of battery power and shows both detail and a larger area.
And now I have the iPad, too 8-)

--
Erilar, biblioholic medievalist with iPad

1.4.2011 16:49, Erilar kirjoitti:
its uses, for instance.
I didn't want a fancy one with maps, because I want a real map as well; it
can't run out of battery power and shows both detail and a larger area.
And now I have the iPad, too 8-)

Why not having both of them? Digital maps are now very cheap. Especially
street maps. Recently I bought a Garmin street atlas covering the USA
and Canada by 39 euros. A copy covering Mexico as well had cost some 13
euros more. TomTom sells their maps by similar price tags.

It is true that a GPS receiver without a street map in towns is a great
aid. However, you can boost the usefulness greatly by having a map
installed (most typical way of doing this today is to port a flash card
in the disk drive of the receiver). For most parts the database holds
information on millions, if not tens of millions of points of interest:
locations of tourist attractions (which can be divided to dozens of
subsets), hotels, restaurants, stops connected to transportation grids
and so on. Typically you don't have to save a location of general
interest to your gadget - it has been probably done for you already.

In 2007 I drove a rented car in Egypt. Back then neither Garmin nor
TomTom provided a detailed road map on the country (nowadays it is
different). My Garmin unit (GPSMap76) had only this "World Map"
pre-installed. Needless to say it was very sketchy.

I got lost only once when I drove from Ismailya by the canal to
Alexandria. When I was driving in the city of Zagazig in the delta along
the highway #1 (no there are not many by-passes built in Egypt) there
was a turn (probably to left but possibly to right) somewhere in town to
further drive toward to the city of Tanta in north west. I missed the
junction. Both the digital map and the hard copy map were far too
sketchy to depict the road network in detail. Furthermore, the signposts
were not of any good either - I cannot read Arabic script.

The GPS receiver helped me out of this though. My location was drawn on
the screen to follow a road which leads to the city of Al Mansura in
north. I decided to drive there and while in town find a way out to a
highway taking me to Tanta and further to Alexandria. It worked even if
I reached Alexandria much later than I had planned.

Bert Hyman:

I doubt that the 76CSx is still in production, but Garmin and all the
other vendors have similar handheld receivers with similar features.


A nice compact receiver is the Garmin Dakota-20. I use it to go
geocaching. Loaded with OpenStreetmaps, it's affordable. It includes
routing, but with those maps there's no way to search for street names.
Street names are, usually, displayed in the maps, though.

Nokia phones use Ovi maps, which are (at least in Europe) included and
free. No need to turn on UMTS reception. Of course, Nokia phones aren't
rugged, waterproof outdoor devices, like the Dakota and its big brother
Oregon are.


--
Erick

Bert Hyman wrote on Apr 1, 2011:

I was mostly interested in saving the receiver's tracklog which had a
time-stamped record of everywhere we'd been. Comparing the time and
location of records in the tracklog with the timestamp of the photos
from our camera helps us figure out just where we were when we took the
pictures :-)

You don't have to figure it out yourself. There are many applications around
that will do it automatically. You just load the picture file into the app.
together with the gpx tracklog file from your gps receiver, and it will write
the location into the metadata of each image file so that it's permanently
recorded with the image.

I do this whenever I return from holiday - it only takes a few minutes to
geotag several hundred images.

--
Mike Lane
UK North Yorkshire
mike_lane at mac dot com

On Thu, 31 Mar 2011 21:04:27 -0700 (PDT), PeterL
wrote:

I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a compact GPS one can carry around
as a pedestrian.

I have an older iWay 350C for pedestrian use. It's only a 3.5" screen,
and not so thin, but it has ~8 hours of battery life. I haven't been
able to find any GPS with such a long battery life for the past few
years.

When my ipad2 comes next week, it might fill that role as well.

-- Larry

Markku Grönroos wrote:
1.4.2011 16:49, Erilar kirjoitti:
its uses, for instance.
I didn't want a fancy one with maps, because I want a real map as well; it
can't run out of battery power and shows both detail and a larger area.
And now I have the iPad, too 8-)

Why not having both of them? Digital maps are now very cheap. Especially
street maps. Recently I bought a Garmin street atlas covering the USA and
Canada by 39 euros. A copy covering Mexico as well had cost some 13 euros
more. TomTom sells their maps by similar price tags.

I have all that kind of info on my iPad when I have internet access, but
it's not something I can stick in a pants pocket as I can my etrex and a
paper map. And my fairly basic cellphone can do a lot, too, but only here
in the US.

Furthermore, I suspect those map-toting Garmins and others are a LOT more
expensive than mine as well as larger, heavier, and still
battery-dependant, nicht wahr?

It is true that a GPS receiver without a street map in towns is a great
aid. However, you can boost the usefulness greatly by having a map
installed (most typical way of doing this today is to port a flash card
in the disk drive of the receiver). For most parts the database holds
information on millions, if not tens of millions of points of interest:
locations of tourist attractions (which can be divided to dozens of
subsets), hotels, restaurants, stops connected to transportation grids
and so on. Typically you don't have to save a location of general
interest to your gadget - it has been probably done for you already.

In 2007 I drove a rented car in Egypt. Back then neither Garmin nor
TomTom provided a detailed road map on the country (nowadays it is
different). My Garmin unit (GPSMap76) had only this "World Map"
pre-installed. Needless to say it was very sketchy.

I got lost only once when I drove from Ismailya by the canal to
Alexandria. When I was driving in the city of Zagazig in the delta along
the highway #1 (no there are not many by-passes built in Egypt) there was
a turn (probably to left but possibly to right) somewhere in town to
further drive toward to the city of Tanta in north west. I missed the
junction. Both the digital map and the hard copy map were far too sketchy
to depict the road network in detail. Furthermore, the signposts were not
of any good either - I cannot read Arabic script.

The GPS receiver helped me out of this though. My location was drawn on
the screen to follow a road which leads to the city of Al Mansura in
north. I decided to drive there and while in town find a way out to a
highway taking me to Tanta and further to Alexandria. It worked even if I
reached Alexandria much later than I had planned.


--
Erilar, biblioholic medievalist with iPad