Looking for Advice on On-Board GPS Units

Self | July 31, 2009 | Alberta's Child

[Alberta's Child]

Thanks to both of you. My research has helped me narrow this down to some high-end Garmins and TomToms.

I'm surprised how few of these have any "trip log" capabilities. Many of them are set up to upload routes from your PC to the GPS, but the ability to download a trip log from the GPS appears to be pretty rare. The ones I'm looking at have capacity to log 10,000 data points, which sounds like a lot but is less than three hours worth of driving if the GPS unit logs a reading every second.

[Alberta's Child]

That’s a great resource, TSmith130 . . . thanks!

[Reeses]

get a refurbished one.

Back when these were expensive, many people would "buy" a GPS to use on a vacation, then return it. Another scam was when flat panel TVs were dropping fast in price. Some customers would return them periodically to get a nicer or cheaper model every few months. They don't think so but this is theft, driving up prices for the rest of us. This is mostly Obama's voter base, although I did know one communist-country foreign-born/now conservative that did this.

[Reeses]

the ability to download a trip log

They should use strong encryption for that. It could be used against the owner in an accident, for speeding, in divorce court, or placing an innocent person near a crime scene. But cell phones already do much of that.

[McGruff]

I was just thinking about picking up a portable GPS for a road trip to NYC and Washington DC. Bookmarking this thread.

[Alberta's Child]

That's a good point. The limited memory capacity makes it difficult to retrieve any data from a trip more than 3 hours long, and when I download data into tabular format there is no reference to where it actually came from.

A latitude/longitude and speed reading every second for 3 hours could have come from anywhere -- including someone else's vehicle.