12 out of 12 people found this review helpful.
Good GPS Sensor
Date of Review: Aug 7, 2006
The Bottom Line: This is a good product. But you might have to experiment to make it work with your map software.
A somewhat technical review:
This is a very small receiver that plugs into a USB port. You need to install a software driver that receives data from the USB/GPS and converts it to a virtual serial COM port. So, you must be certain your navigation software can access COM ports and accept NMEA formatted data. I was able to make it work OK.
There is also software for advanced technical users that allows examination and configuration of the inner workings. Don't use this if you are not technically proficient.
This GPS is very sensitive and usually provides a fix within a 45 seconds. I had no problems getting it working inside my plywood roofed house. Outdoors, most of the fixes were within a 60 foot diameter circle (WAAS off). That's about the limit of performance for the public GPS signal.
If you do not know what WAAS is this will not concern you. Here at the Chesapeake Bay, I only receive a European satellite and it's signals would fade in and fade out. There are two geo-stationary satellites that provide WAAS corrections signals to the United States but I have not yet seen the receiver lock onto one. So I cannot tell you if WAAS mode works. Normal performance does not seem to be degraded with WAAS on.
Another observation: This GPS does not compute magnetic variation information for computing compass courses. This is usually not a problem because most navigation software computes this independently.
