Sunday, Aug 23, 2009 at 13:43
Hi JBG, I'm just dealing with the same issue since I got lost in the dark due to BIG trees down across the road no blimmin maps a useless city streets gps which has next to no country roads..not to mention eventually arriving at a gas station with <5l left! The missus said sort it out because I'm not coming on one of your trips again until you do!
To cut to the chase I feel for you because its bewildering the amount of choices, map providers, software equipment etc. so I will tell you what I did. First stop was Robert Pepper's "GPS Vehicle Navigation in Australia" available from ExplorOz
shop. Buy and read this first. Its an excellent book because it first of all explains how GPS works, and for someone that grew up with topo maps and compasses helps with the transition to the computer navigation world! The second thing I like about the book is he spends 2/3 of it dealing with the different types of equipment, software, how to mount and use in your vehicle etc.... Its a good book. I was going to go down the laptop road but mounting and space was going to be an issue, the Hema was to expensive so I went for an ebay 7" HD GPS with windows CE and spent the saving on OziExplorer/+CE and Hema and 250k map set. Total cost about $600 saving $390 on the Hema set-up. So I have loaded Ozi CE on the 7" (a bit of mucking about - you need to be confident with computers and search the web if you have problems), the Hema maps cd is excellent and contains 250k sheets for Australia - the Hema CD would probably be enough if I was buying again. I've installed Ozi on the home pc and do all the work there and CE on the GPS. An unexpected big plus with OziCE is you can design your screen just the way you like it so lately I have been busy doing this which is quite fun - it also gives you an excuse to go for a country drive for "software testing".
The big screen GPS is working out good as its essentially a mini computer but without the size of a laptop, wiring issues, plugs, cables mounts etc. But if you buy a large screen GPS make sure it has a battery - not that they last very long but at least if you disconnect the 12v (pull the plug by accident etc) you don't hard crash it. You also want to make sure it has a high sensitivity receiver that doesn't require regualr gps co-ordinate patches (a problem in the bush) the Sirf 3 chipset is pretty much the current std. The big 7" HD screen is plenty of real estate (800x480) and you can still mount it up on the dash with out it blocking your view to any extent - very difficult to do with a laptop, and its reasonably vibration tolerant.
Mine is a HK Ebay special the only downside is the screen is unreadable in direct sun so I am busy building various shades. I also installed a retransmitting antenna - not sure I would bother next time. The overall plan is to put Ozi on the big laptop and using that for route planning / management when parked up. Ozi explorer is really growing on me as first lots of people use it so all the problems I have had, someone else has had before which means you can find answer. Its map management just works, it feels like its been built by real world users as all the things you seem to want to do is in there. The CE screen designer is really easy to use and works really
well. About the only against it, is it lacks the sparkle and polish that alternate packages but once you start using it you soon forget about that as it does the job really
well. But back to the beginning start with Pepper's book first.
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