Its about time something came up where I can offer some good information from experience!
Right off the bat, I can tell you that a GPS receiver is among the top ten cool toys in my collection. The whole system is based on receiving signals from a series of satellites circling the earth. My understanding is that they were put there by the dep't of defense. Initially, signals were degraded so that the common public user could make use of the GPS signals, but would have a relatively limited degree of accuracy unless certain codes were entered into the unit to compensate. This degradation of the signals wasn't a degraded *weakness* of signals, but rather the gov't telling the satellites to throw you off 50' to the north or 100 yards to the southwest. Anyhow, all of that is irrelevant now because about 4 years ago (maybe a bit less but I'm not sure), the degradation of signals was discontinued The GPS itself if an awesome toy that can give a really cool abundance of information. The more you use it, the more uses you'll find for it. Of course you can use most GPS units (Mine's a very basic Garmin GPS 12 - it sold for about $150 approx. 4 years ago and its still plenty current) to plot waypoints, keep an eye on some general navigation info and to calculate distance, speed and ETA between waypoints. Some of the things you can do with a GPS include: - If you go out in blue water with no landmarks or access to loran signals (or other similar place), all you've got to do is mark your starting point before leaving and the GPS will guide you back to it while providing an abundance of information. Many units will provide a map in a variety of scales which will trace the path taken as well as the path of return. Estimated time to waypoint is calculated based on current rate of speedThe unit will also guide you along a path as close to a straight line as you can steer the boat. - You can gather more travel data than could easily be collected before. Plenty of navigation information can be observed while traveling or after traveling in some cases. - More current units can download information from CD-ROMs. - Lots of units can display to a laptop PC for larger screen size. I also use mine for a couple of other things. Fuel consumption/distance can be easily calculated since GPS units have trip odometers. Engine performance can also be gauged by using highly accurate speed and top speed indicators. I even used mine to figure out the change in my truck's speedometer when I added larger tires. I can't possibly do justice to the usefulness of a GPS unit. If there are any specific questions which have still gone unanswered, I'd be happy to address them if I can. Just let me know! I guarantee you'll consider it $100 well spent as long as you get one with a mapping feature. John "Don Ordes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 11/17/2002 10:47:26 PM Please respond to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: (bcc: John Roth-CPD/USA/MCCRK) Subject: Re: [VFB] was Explorer, now MAPS, now GPS ----- Original Message ----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] That is, until the Commander in Chief orders the degradation or encryption of the signals. Bob VanAmburg Thanks, Is there talk of doing this? DonO
