Delorme Earthmate PN-20

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bachand

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I got this sweet gift for fathers day!!! Does anyone else have one yet? If not I can totally vouch for it. It is an awesome unit. The Topo 6 software is also very nice. You can download USGS 1:24000 quad maps as well as arieal and satelite imagery from Delorme's website and transfer these onto the PN-20. It shows your GPS position overlaid on the quad map. Very cool. You can also view the imagery on your PC in 3d view mode with the arieal imagery overlaid on the terain.
The only downside that I have seen so far is in the routing. The software is very smart in picking the best route between start and finish and yoou can select to route between roads or trails. You can not however create a route using both roads and trails. It took me two days and a post to Delorme's web forum to figure that one out. The workaround is to create two routes, one of the raod and the other of the trail sections. Kind of a bummer but a minor thing compared to the other capibilities.

Marc
 
Dugan said:
What would make it everything a GPS should be?

Mostly, open architecture of the exchange data. The ability to put whatever raster or vector type information that I have and be able to transfer it into the device for display.

Keith
 
There is a reasonably informative review with pointers to several other reviews at http://gpstracklog.typepad.com/gps_tracklog/2007/01/delorme_earthma.html

It uses the SIRF Star III GPS chipset so it should function well with less than ideal skyviews.

Offhand, it looks like the primary unique feature (compared to other consumer hiking GPSes) is the ability to display aerial photos. The photos, however, appear to be rather expensive (equivalent to ~$39 per 7.5min USGS quad) and there were some complaints about the quality. DeLorme claims to be working on making better photos available.

Doug
 
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