Dunno your price range but a PDA with GPS might be of interest for you. Have seen the cheapest once for about 400$ in Bangkok, but sure not the cheapest place to get something like that.
Afterwards you buy pathaway software and that's all you need. You can load maps (bought ones or scanned (digital-camera-image...) and calibrated), you can load routes and follow those, you can set points, you can track your own rides/walks/etc. I think it can give you accoustic turning warnings/instructions as well, don't use it however myself.
Battery on my PDA/GPS combo lasts for about 5-6hrs of tracking, however I use a external GPS connected by bluetooth which sucks a lot of power (PDA with no bluetooth on runs about 8-9 hours!).
A PDA with changeable battery is recommended.
The new Sirf 3 chip is worth the money in my opinion, it connects much faster (especially while moving in a car), is much better in cities with highrise/narrow valleys/dense forest with rain, has much less inaccurancies (every now and then GPS goes wild for a nick of a moment...).
Not neccessary to have but just much more comfortable to use...
But as I said, comes with a price...
Best
Markus
**
I noticed someone posted a knock against GPS reception in canyons and cities. For anyone interested, there is much newer technology to handle poor reception. This is from one of the newer Garmin products:
<blockquote>Quote
<hr>SiRFstar III™ chipset provides rapid first fix and is sensitive enough to acquire signals in urban canyons and under dense foliage<hr></blockquote>
Ok, here are my two cents. I just bought a Garmin Forerunner 205, and I think it might actually be useful for travelling as well as sports. It's the smallest GPS I've seen - it looks like an oversized watch. It's $140 right now on Amazon with rebate. It doesn't have maps, just points and routes (if you set them up in advance).
Two things I can see it would be helpful for travelling with:
1) You can use it to help you find places. Set up a list of locations before you leave of places you want to go to (i.e. churches, museums, hotels, restaurants)... Now just punch in "Go to location xxxx" and it will bring up a compass and show you which way to walk. In addition it will tell you how far away you are, and how long it will take you to get there at your current pace. It will also show a very rudimentary map with other points of interest around it. The big negative here is that your place names are limited to 8 characters. (!!) In addition, if you end up in a hotel you didn't anticipate when you left home, you can record a new point, and always find your way back home that way.
2) You can use it to geo-locate your digital photos when you get home. Every time you're taking photos, start the GPS data collection. This records time and place. Then, there are tools you can use to correlate the photos with the GPS location and tag the jpg's with the lat/long, so you can easily upload to flickr, google earth, etc. etc. The negative here is that you have to remember to turn on the data collection - if you leave it on you might run out of room and find it's deleting old data (unless you can offload at an internet cafe)
The real benefit to me over other GPS/navigation devices is that it is small. There's a lot of places in the world where I wouldn't want to pull out a fancy color-screen gadget and use that to direct me - or the next time I turn a corner, I will be liberated of said gadget. However, to the average thief, this thing just looks like a big, ugly digital watch. (that you have to recharge every day!!!).
Oh by the way, reception is INCREDIBLE. It works indoors! (I kid you not. Accuracy goes down, but it still works !! )
Ian
trusted partner
