Don't know what others reccomend, but I bought the Hema Navigator. It's expensive, but has every map I'll ever need already on it. On and Off road. Haven't used it yet, but the day will come. www.hemanavigator.com.au
Just don't bother with Track Ranger the gps bit is good but the mapping is uptaa due to the scale of the digitised maps available. Been discussed on here and there is no practical solution apart from scanning in your own maps which may not be that bad if you wanted to do a few trips into the wildeness but not 100's of KM.
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Don't take life too seriously.... No one gets out alive
KIA Sorento CRDi EX ( Ebony black) with 5 hex chrome plated tire air valve covers, Coramal Sunsheild, Elcheapo GPS, First Aid Kit, full KIA toolkit & Yellow lenses on the Foglights......
Compass and the sun you don't need a GPS to tell you you stuffed up and are lost. Not to many road maps for deserts just one dune after another until you reach the big blue water holes
If going out into the wilds of OZ and you feel unsure where you are then back track your own tracks remember the basics of survival and stay with the vehicle if anything goes wrong.
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Pets are welcome but children must be leashed at all times
Can anybody suggest the most user friendly and reliable gps for desert travel etc, rgds Gitsho
Its not so much about what is the best GPS its more about the maps (and details of those maps) that the GPS is linked to.
Basically speaking all GPS units do the same thing - they pick up your location from the overhead sattelittes and create a signal that is read by the GPS or sent to your laptop.
I have the following set up - you may or may not want to do it this way - there as many variances to this theme as there are stars in the sky
I have a Garmin 276c which is loaded with City Navigator NT 2009. This map is excellent for the cities and black stuff but lacks detail to varying degress once you leave the black stuff.
You can however also load a FREE set of maps called ShonkMaps which work on Garmin GPS also.
To accomodate the lack of deatil in the CN NT 2009 I run the GPS into my laptop where I have more mapping software options that allow me to use 'non Garmin' mapping.
To do this I use Oziexplore and a number of maps from different sources - OzTopo, T4A, Hema etc etc
So if I am in area that the CN NT 2009 is lacking detail I can switch between various software programmes and maps on my laptop until I get the best detail that I can
Guess I,m one of the old farts who are out of date, I use a hand held one "Magellan, but only to mark specific spots, and I have been told I have an extraordinary sence of direction, , the ability to smell water is also handy, and have sometime walked on it ?????, or should I say over it with a devining rod , actually wires , thats what is used to find the sapphire underground and as Judy is constantly telling me where to go , I feel an update is unnessecary
I'm interested in the Trackranger product as I am I'm interested in your comments you made about the maps. How do I get on to the recent, past discussion about Trackranger that you refered to on 1-6-09 ?