Handheld GPS Units (1 Viewer)

[Ken Wagner]

Anyone have any experience with these. Brand, pricing, online sales? How accurate are they? Thanks.

 

[Tom Keels]

Handhelds are very accurate. Down here in Florida, nearly all the guys I fish with have handhelds. The best hand held I have seen is the Garmin GPSmap 76. This is WAAS enabled and is accurate down to a few feet. Since the govt turned off SA or selective availability all GPS units have become more accurate. If you have one choice for a unit go with Garmin with one exception...stay away from the lower Etrex models.

 

[Jay H]

Ken, what do you plan on doing with it. There are a bunch of different classes of GPS units, since you're talking Handheld, I presume it's not for aviation since most of them are bigger console units, but for hiking/boating/fishing/hunting, there are some handheld units that are catered towards a certain sport. Some of them include built-in Marine Charts (boating), major highways (travel), or sunrise/sunset times (fishing/hunting). Some of them will record your total elevation gain/loss (hiking).
Garmin and Magellan are the two biggie players with Lowrance coming in to play for the diehards.
http://joe.mehaffey.com/
is an excellent site for info and reviews and stuff. They're primarily a Garmin site but they have info on the other two there too.
Tom, just curious what do you think is bad about the Etrex? I know a bunch of hikers who swear by the cheap Etrex Summit model. Just curious? I have an old Magellan MAP 410 myself which is a bit heavy but has a bunch of features for fishing and also travelling so it's not just a hiking model.
Jay

 

[Andrew Pratt]

This is WAAS enabled and is accurate down to a few feet.

This isn't possible with the hand helds...at least not with out some sort of correction factor being applied on the fly from a ground control station. Typically the range of accuracy depends partially on how you have your GPS set up but assuming you have the averaging function turned on you should be able to get within 15 - 20 feet or so of the true location the most of the time. Things like buildings, hills, trees, & low number of aquired satalites ets all lower the accuracy.

As for brands etc we tend to stick to Garmin's and have had great success with them. I would make sure that which ever one you buy has some sort of PC interface cable to allow you to update the software/firmware etc and allow you to connect it to a laptop etc

 

[Tom Keels]

Jay

Some of the older e-trex models needed firmware upgades to work properly. A lot of the smaller stores that carried them were not notifying the customers of the needed upgrade and people were getting screwed and that can be dangerous when relying on a piece of equipment to get you home safely. This was before the summit model came out.

Andrew

WAAS uses two additional satellites for the diferential. While they are not as accurate as diferential (land based)enabled models they are still accurate with an EPE of

 

[Ken Wagner]

Thanks for the replies. If I ever get time again, I'd use it for fishing and hunting. I think the PC interface is important. I don't want to spend a fortune though. I tend to research things to death before I buy. Can't help it.

 

[Philip_G]

fishing... eh probably OK, if you're out in open water...
hunting.... ehhhhhhhhh not so good, if you're in the trees or obscurred in pretty much any way by tall objects you're going to have signal problems.
they do make handhelds for aviation, I'd venture there are more handhelds out there than in panel, simply because they're 300-1500$ and you don't have to pay an avionics tech to install them. However they're for VFR flight only. Either way probably a good backup.
our training fleet has garmin GNS430 (dual at that even) in all their airplanes.. GPS is SOOO nice especially with an autopilot