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Mitsubishi 4WD Owners Club of Qld (Inc) |
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GPS - Part 9 |
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GPS-101 Part 9 (The Final Waypoint) I’m sure that after reading the last few issues, some of you are saying “Just tell me what to buy!”. Well, as I explained back in part 2, there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution. The trend among club members who I know have purchased GPS units recently seems to be a PDA-based unit running Windows Mobile, with a built-in high sensitivity receiver, street navigation software, and general GPS software. This affords them the option to also run a raster moving map package, such as OziExplorer CE, for their off-road adventures. I’m going to run a weekend trip sometime next year where we’ll do a bit of theory and some practical GPS exercises. So keep your eye on the trip calendar in the New Year. Once you’ve gotten into using your GPS, you might want to get into Geocaching. According to www.geocaching.com, “Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is, if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.” Or, you might want to plot your GPS Tracks onto Google Earth (www.earth.google.com). You’ll need to pay an annual subscription to use this feature, but it is kind of cool. Or, you can start linking your photos to GPS coordinates – so that you can remember where the photos were taken. Or, you could join the Degree Confluence Project. The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures, and stories about the visits, are posted at the following web site: http://confluence.org/index.php. There are still some to be taken in Australia. Or, maybe you can plan, reccy, and then run a trip. There are plenty of experienced trip leaders in the club who’d love to help you run a trip. Well, we’ve reached our final waypoint. I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey and didn’t get too lost along the way. There are a lot more topics I could cover, but I’m going to park it here for the series. I’ll submit new info to the magazine from time to time as exciting new developments emerge in the GPS world. Cheers for now - Happy Navigating. Greg Conlon |
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