GPS gadgets make perfect travel buddies
On a kayak fishing trip in Florida last month, I followed the rising tide through a maze of mangroves, salt creeks and bayous. Unhooking a redfish about three hours later, I realized I didn’t have the first idea of where I was.
But tucked into my paddling vest was a Garmin Geko 201 GPS the size of a small cell phone and weighing fewer than four ounces, including two AA batteries. It took seconds for this little wonder to locate four satellites and calculate that the place where I started was 1.37 miles away on a bearing of 106 degrees.
Oh, the wonders of the Global Positioning System.
Hand-held GPS units that will plot your position with 30-foot accuracy can be had for as little as $79. And the difference in accuracy between the $79 unit and a $500 model is negligible.
The higher prices come with added features like built-in maps or marine charts, altitude measuring, color screens, internal memory and the ability to download new maps and data from a computer or memory card.
More expensive models usually can pick up the satellite signals better in areas where reception is marginal or limited by buildings, hills or dense tree cover, but not always.
Before you buy a handheld GPS, think about what you want to do with it and how you would use it. Will you carry it in the woods while hunting grouse or deer? Then you’ll want to pay more for a GPS with superior satellite reception. Do you want to use it as a fishing tool? Then you’ll probably want built-in marine charts. And as an outdoors person, I would never buy a handheld that wasn’t waterproof.
I often carry a $150 Magellan eXplorist 200 in the truck, which has a black-and-white screen and a rudimentary map of the United States. It shows towns and county, state and federal highways. It’s also the unit I usually carry while hunting and hiking because it works well in the woods, is small enough to slip into a vest pocket and has a tracking screen that lets me record where I’ve been and log points of interest.
But on long trips, I nearly always have my Brunton Atlas MNS, a $350 unit that also has a relatively simple map and lets me call up numbered exits on every major freeway and see what service stations, restaurants and other points of interest are available.
All GPS units will store 100 or more locations - waypoints - in their internal memory. Some can store 500.
An important factor that’s often overlooked is battery life. Most units today will run eight hours or more on a couple of AA or AAA batteries. I look for units that will run 12 hours nonstop, which means that a couple of sets of batteries will give me several days of intermittent use.
Source: BY ERIC SHARP-Detroit Free Press
