The REF at work: New MicroDAGR GPS Coming in January
October 9th, 2009 | Product Announcement Programatics | Posted by Rob Curtis
Rockwell-Collins’ new baby-DAGR finally drags the military handheld GPS into 2008 featuring a touch screen, built in camera and MP3 player.
“Designed in response to feedback from soldiers in the field, the
MicroDAGR also incorporates several new features including vibration alert, an MP3 player and a digital camera. These features will allow soldiers to record geo-rectified images of the battlefield for after-action review and analysis, listen to foreign language translations of important commands and phrases and get silent alerts from their MicroDAGR when they reach preprogrammed waypoints and/or danger areas”.
No word on price, but anything that uses the secure GPS bands is going to be on the Gucci end of military gadgets. With the original DAGR running about $1600 a pop for almost new millennium tech, it’s no wonder Rockwell-Collins has been pleading with soldiers not to use commercial GPS units that cost 1/10 the price and offer performance and features that soldiers value more than the military specific features of the clunky DAGR.
Looking at the press release, it looks like Rockwell-Collins and the Army have listened to soldiers and brought their new handheld GPS receiver into feature parity with the commercial market. But, there is a big difference between reality and marketing. We’ll have to wait until units start getting these early next year to hear how well they work in the real world. Regardless of the price, if the MicroDAGR is as easy to use as a Garmin, units won’t shelve them in favor of commercial GPS receivers.
Gen2 SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger – Closer Look
August 26th, 2009 | Link Product Announcement | Posted by Rob Curtis
Survival gear expert Doug Ritter has a great post about Spot’s hardware update on his Equipped to Survive blog. It’s not a gear review, though he’s gone point by point over the updates providing excellent context for each of the changes to the device.
Second Generation SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger Introduced | Doug Ritter’s Equipped.org Blog.
Garmin Foretrex 401 – Exclusive Gear Recon
June 9th, 2009 | Product Announcement Review | Posted by Rob Curtis
The first-generation wrist-mounted GPS were all about recreation, and if you used one in the field or on missions, you noticed they came up a bit short. But now Garmin has taken the original and slimmed it down into sleeker, more powerful tool. GearScout got a final prototype to play with weeks before its release.
New Garmin Oregon 550 Brings CameraGPS
May 10th, 2009 | Product Announcement | Posted by Rob Curtis
Garmin just announced their new top of the line Oregon 550t handheld GPS unit. $600 buys a 3.2 megapixel camera (slightly better than cellphone quality), a 3D compass that display a direction without having to hold the unit level and a new sunlight-readable display. Other than that, you get the usual Oregon touch screen, preloaded 100k scale US topographic map set, yadayada.
I don’t know if the Best Buy crowd is too excited about the 3.2mp camera –especially when point and shoot cameras are hitting 14.7mp. BUT- a small, waterproof unit that has the ability to PID a target or an area of interest with a geotagged photo may be interesting to ground guys and secret squirrels.
On the flip-side of the geotagging coin is the Nikon Coolpix P6000, a 13.5mp camera that will geotag your images. The camera won’t do navgation and it’s a more delicate device, but it will take far more useable photographs.
Still, if you regularly carry a GPS into the field anyway, a cameraGPS is better than nothing. It takes up less space and weighs less than a separate camera and is one less battery charger you have to keep around.
NaviSeer Knows Where You Are
March 18th, 2009 | Product Announcement | Posted by Rob Curtis
Somewhere, right now, there is a guy in a lab coat figuring out how to tie this black box into another black box so it can relay your movements back in realtime to another black box and give on-scene commanders huge situational awareness.
Replace the current Land Warrior nav box with SEER’s NaviSeer and you’ll have pinpoint SA in GPS-denied environments. While Land Warrior’s nav box has dead reckoning, it only knows what direction you were heading when GPS cut out, how fast you were going and if you stop. Basically, it’s useless indoors.
On the other hand, NaviSeer is a much more sophisticated unit that uses hardware and proprietary software to track your movements relative to a last known point. It’s a self contained unit that houses three gyros, three accelerometers (one at each axis), a magnetometer and a baro altimeter and a GPS module. When GPS is available, the DR functions are automatically calibrated continuously. When GPS is unavailable, DR takes over.