hillwalking gps

grumpygit

hi
anyone out there know a good gps for hillwalking in the wicklow mountains . Thinking of the garmin vista or similar but woild like to know if it would be of any use, Are the maps any good etc or more to the point is there any maps out there. Any ideas or pointers to any good websites would be welcome

Alun

Do a search on this forum ... there are plenty of threads discussing the availability (or rather not) of Irish mapping for GPS's. Things may change when, or rather if, Garmin ever release the OSi based mapping for Ireland that they've been rumoured to be bringing out for a while now.

However, as a good reasonably priced start I'd suggest the etrex Venture HC together with either the free SMC contour maps or the Emerald Isle maps (search the threads in here) as possibly the best value for money at the moment.

grumpygit

was kind of hoping someone would say OSI maps were available, seems that might be a dream too much. I did download the map from emerald isle maps you suggested(currently tryin to see if i can open it on my pc, might be another dream)
checked the ventura versus vista out on amazon, ventura goin for 115 pounds versus 185 for vista. With vista they advertise 25 hours battery life versus 14 on ventura . vista also has 1000 waypoints versus 500 on ventura, Vista also uses an sd card versus 24 MB on board on ventura besides these they seem to be virtually the same except for the electronic compass on the vista which by all accounts is a piece of crap so i may deciede whether the extras are worth 70 GBP or not. Thanks for your advice and help

cheapskate

Garmin 60CSx excellent GPS for hillwalking

http://www.mysatnav.ie/garmin-gpsmap-60csx


Hope this helps

CS

grumpygit

Thanks CS .. good site, like the compare link, prices dont seem that competitive though €335 to €267 on Amazon. That puts
venture €133
vista €214
60csx €267
so its a case of decieding what i can spend. No doubt if I go to buy from amazon it will come back and tell me they don't sell these into Ireland but am sure the prices will be matched on ebay

hugoline

grumpygit wrote: »

(currently tryin to see if i can open it on my pc, might be another dream)

To see the maps on the PC you need Mapsource installed, more info here

Back to your question to which GPS is good for hillwalking in the wiklows: it depends on the money you want to spend.

Aluns suggestion of a Venture HC is a realy good starter, gives mapping capability and color (which I think is quite important to differentiate between streams and paths...)

On the upper price scale are the Oregons, where apparently you can load your own scans as background image (can't find the link at the moment, but do a google search)

For the mapping material, you can make your own map on a garmin although a lot of time and some tinkering is required

Additionally you can also check out the Openstreetmaps. A user maintains a program which is available on a server, where parts of the whole world can be downloaded onto the Garmin GPS including routing. Beware though, this map is opensource, so there are mistakes in there as well. And it is by all means not complete, but you can contribute yourself if you want.

I a Vista HCx and am really happy with it. I use a mixture of the openstreet maps, the SMC contour map and generally plan the hike before on the OSI online map and mark waypoints in my GPS (coordinates from the website)

As Alun said as well, there is no easy and perfect solution at the moment, but there are some good GPSs with maps out there depending how much money (or time) you want to spend before the hike.

Alun

hugoline wrote: »

On the upper price scale are the Oregons, where apparently you can load your own scans as background image (can't find the link at the moment, but do a google search)

When the Oregon first came out there was a rush of enthusiastic postings on various BBS's about being able to use self-scanned maps but I've not seen any actual how-tos on how to do it yet. If you know of any, I'd be interested. They're pretty pricey though.

I a Vista HCx and am really happy with it.

I have the Vista HCx too, and it's great although if I had to buy another one for whatever reason, I'd probably go for the Legend HCx, as the inbuilt compass is a waste of time and the barimetric altimeter is more trouble than it's worth IMO. The Legend is identical to the Vista in every way apart from these two features.

hugoline

Alun wrote: »

When the Oregon first came out there was a rush of enthusiastic postings on various BBS's about being able to use self-scanned maps but I've not seen any actual how-tos on how to do it yet. If you know of any, I'd be interested. They're pretty pricey though.

Yes, good quality and easily doable doesn't come for free unfortunately. I found some more info with apparent screen shots here and another program mapwel (should also work for the Vistas, haven't seen any screenshots though)
more info also here (and I am sure ther is more out there)

Again, if you have the money to spend... (I don't )

Alun wrote: »

I have the Vista HCx too, and it's great although if I had to buy another one for whatever reason, I'd probably go for the Legend HCx, as the inbuilt compass is a waste of time and the barimetric altimeter is more trouble than it's worth IMO. The Legend is identical to the Vista in every way apart from these two features.

I completly agree with the compass, the altimeter can be useful sometimes as an alternative info of how far to the top.
I used to have the VistaC which stored the pressure plots even when switched off. Great when you are outdoors for days and need some weather forecast. Unfortuantely in the Vista HCx it needs to be turned on to record...

dogmatix

I own and use a 60 CSx and will now never head out without it. I espcially like its route logging facility - it tells you exactly how far you have walked, time walking, time stopped, altitude gained etc. It has loads of other features as well - but it is very expensive.

I still have not gotten around to using it to create my own maps yet - thats a future project to look forward to.

Alun

dogmatix wrote: »

I own and use a 60 CSx and will now never head out without it. I espcially like its route logging facility - it tells you exactly how far you have walked, time walking, time stopped, altitude gained etc. It has loads of other features as well - but it is very expensive.

... as does every other outdoor oriented GPS on the market including the cheapest etrex models (except altitude gain, that's only for the models with built-in barometric altimeter).

Alun

hugoline wrote: »

Yes, good quality and easily doable doesn't come for free unfortunately. I found some more info with apparent screen shots here and another program mapwel (should also work for the Vistas, haven't seen any screenshots though)
more info also here (and I am sure there is more out there)

Again, if you have the money to spend... (I don't )

Thanks for that, I'll take a look. I tried things like mapwel for my Vista, and there's another whose name escapes me, but they're huge fudges and really don't work very well at all in my experience.

I completely agree with the compass, the altimeter can be useful sometimes as an alternative info of how far to the top.

In real life though the GPS derived altitude displayed by models without the barometric altimeter is more than good enough for that purpose in most situations. In theory the inherent errors in the GPS derived altitude should be quite high, higher than the positional error, but in practice with my old GPS, an ancient etrex Venture for example, I rarely saw any significant errors in the displayed altitude at most reference points (i.e. summits and trig points), usually accurate within a meter or two anyway.

I used to have the VistaC which stored the pressure plots even when switched off. Great when you are outdoors for days and need some weather forecast. Unfortunately in the Vista HCx it needs to be turned on to record...

I suppose that is useful, although I find that on days where there is a significant change in normalized air pressure, i.e. a really stormy day with a front coming in, the auto-calibration feature gets fooled easily, and the displayed altitude can be out by a significant amount. It also gets messed up if you squeeze the casing a bit too hard when removing it from it's case, cover and uncover the small hole at the back with your finger, or even by a string wind, so to my mind it's advantages are outweighed by it's supposed advantages. If only Garmin would give the option to switch between the altimeter and GPS derived altitudes on the display and in the track logs.

IrlJidel

Alun wrote: »

If only Garmin would give the option to switch between the altimeter and GPS derived altitudes on the display and in the track logs.

Its all very confusing but from this thread you can dictate what gets written in the tracklog, I thought it always used gps ele in the tracklog.

Also in the tracklog when using GPS elevation does it record the 'local' elevation or the wgs84 elevation. As a purist I would think it should record the wgs84 elevation as the lat/log are wgs84, if it is using the local elevation the datum is not recorded

Alun

IrlJidel wrote: »

Its all very confusing but from this thread you can dictate what gets written in the tracklog, I thought it always used gps ele in the tracklog.

Yes, I've seen that before, but have never really tested it. Anyway, it's not clear what is displayed for altitude on the Odometer screen in that situation. I must test it some time and see what happens.

Also in the tracklog when using GPS elevation does it record the 'local' elevation or the wgs84 elevation. As a purist I would think it should record the wgs84 elevation as the lat/log are wgs84.

I'm not sure. The display on the GPS supposedly shows local elevation, but AFAIK uses a very sparse table based interpolation technique to work out the difference between the local geoid and the WGS84 reference ellipsoid at that point and subtract / add the difference, so down at sea level you can still be shown to be underwater in some circumstances. Whether programs that process GPS tracks actually have any better local geoid models in order to give better approximations to local elevation, I don't know.

Alun

I should add (if it's at all relevant) that the standard NMEA sentence for reporting position and elevation ($GGA) is supposed to report the elevation as local, i.e. height above the local geoid, but in addition, also reports the difference between that geoid and the WGS84 reference ellipsoid, the so-called "geoidal separation". So you could, assuming that those fields are both filled in (which they may not be) work out the WGS84 elevation from those two fields. I have seen some GPS modules (usually SiRF based ones) that break the NMEA spec by reporting the WGS84 elevation together with a geoidal separation of 0, so it's a bit of a gamble.

grumpygit

guys thanks for all your help, links from hugoline and discussion very informative. put in my order to amazon for Garmin eTrex Vista HCx Handheld GPS total cost including postage EUR 245,52 bit dearer than i wanted to spend but what the hell (no doubt its cheaper somewhere else but I don't want to know). Once again thanks for all your help i would not have had a clue without it and am sure the thread will be very useful to other people.

hugoline

Have fun with your new toy! And any questions just ask.

grumpygit wrote: »

total cost including postage EUR 245,52 bit dearer than i wanted to spend

Amazon unfortunately display the UK VAT and no shipping, but in checkout (last page) it adds the Irish VAT and shipping increasing the costs a bit but AFAIK they are still the cheapest around here and the customer service is good (definitely better than what to expect from a Hong Kong seller on eBay)