Fall 2004 Issue

Big(ger) Screen for Rovers

There are new, incredibly fast, daylight-viewable, portable, big-screen GPS displays with detailed maps showing tiny side roads. They can also feed your APRS radio and TinyTrak.

By Gordon West,* WB6NOA
 

The Garmin Street Pilot® was the choice to tie into the ham APRS.

You have to appreciate all that VHF rovers go through to work multipliers. Their vehicles are loaded with beams and dishes, ready for an almost instant deployment when they finally get to the next hot spot. Inside the driver’s compartment is all the communications gear, plus a dedicated VHF rig specifically for squawking automatic position reports. Feeding the APRS system might also be direction-finding and mapping software on a laptop. In addition, there is the trusty GPS unit.

The Garmin portable GPS is just such a unit. Garmin, along with Magellan, is celebrating over 25 years in the field of GPS. Both companies almost simultaneously broke the $999 price point for a civil (non-military), portable GPS receiver. Garmin was also the first to produce GPS equipment that would read out Maidenhead grid locators. In addition, for our 10-GHz gang, the “ham friendly” GPS also includes 5th and 6th sub-grid characters, pulling down the locator to within about 4 by 3 miles.

All of the Garmin units output the required NMEA 0183 data string for APRS connections. The least expensive units give you just numbers, and a step-up might give you GPS numbers plus a base map of big highways in the U.S. The next step would be the 2.2-inch wide by 1.5-inch high horizontal screen, which is capable of CD upload to show small streets and the big highways where you next plan to rove.

However, the Garmin unit of choice is the Street Pilot, with a larger, 3.3-inch wide by 1.7-inch high screen that includes a compact flash card to download CityNavigator CD-ROMs, allowing one to load in upcoming VHF roving areas. Garmin’s latest version, Street Pilot 2610, features a brilliant color screen and even voice prompts to keep you on track for that secret VHF/UHF rover hot spot. I have a Garmin Street Pilot, and for just under $999, I figured this would be my ultimate rover navigator tool—that is, until I saw the new Italian AvMap, 12-volt DC, GPS mapping navigator with an eye-popping color, transreflective, daylight-viewable, 5.6-inch display. It is only one inch in depth and comes with a suction-cup mounting bracket for near-instant, heads-up dashboard mounting.

The color display utilizes a relatively new marine-electronics technique of transreflective illumination, wherein sunlight actually enhances any wide-angle view of the display. However, most amazing is the Arm9 200-MHz processor, which lets you scroll up and down, or left and right, on the city map and not wait for an agonizing couple of seconds of blank screen redraw. It automatically determines which way you are scrolling to pre-load mapping in the buffer, and you literally can zoom from Florida to Virginia without having to wait for reload. For those of us who regularly go off-road, the AvMap runs on Tele Atlas map data turn-by-turn mapping software. Tele Atlas, based in Menlo Park, California, is the world’s premier provider of digital map databases and real-time traffic information in the United States (www.na.teleatlas.com).
 

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