UPDATE: All Gone. Back up to $123.
Amazon is offering the reliable little Venture HC GPS as its deal of the day. It might be last-gen tech, but it’s still got it where it counts, and for $100, it’s a solid value. It’ll give you posreps all day on a pair of AAs. In addition to its better battery life, the screen is easier to read than the newer touch-screen models.
via Amazon.com
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My running group has a love/hate relationship with my watch; I love it, and on occasion, they want to smash it to bits. It’s hard to fib about mileage when satellite technology tells you your run isn’t nearly as long as you’d thought.
Going to Shot Show? Want a free GPS unit? Find this man on the show floor and tell him you read Gear Scout. He’ll have one Foretrex 401 to give away each day of Shot Show, from Tuesday, Jan. 19, through Friday, Jan. 22. Joe will update his Twitter feed (Stroenterprise) with his location and stalk status while the stalk is in progress. He’s agreed to cut off his mullet to make it easier for our readers to find him in the crowd. He’ll also sport a Garmin ballcap with a large safety pin stuck through the back. As far as all the legalese — this isn’t our contest. We’re just giving you a heads-up.
Not going to make it to the Vegas festival of steel and lead? You’re not left out. StrohmanEnterprise.com is running a virtual Shot Show deal on the new Foretrex 401 GPS for $179 shipped Conus/APO/FPO for military and LEOs from today through Monday, Jan. 25.
We reviewed the Foretrex 401 when it came out, and found its size, battery life, accuracy and especially its wireless route and waypoint sharing all add some hooah/hoorah/hooah/hooyah to your mission.
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Photo: Rockwell Collins
Air Force Times is reporting that the U.S. will reposition GPS satellites to maximize coverage and accuracy globally, but especially over Afghanistan, U.S. Strategic Command announced.
Military planners had asked the Air Force, which operates the GPS satellites, to examine options for improving coverage in Afghanistan, where the mountainous terrain can block signals from GPS satellites. At least four satellites must be in view of a GPS receiver to obtain a position fix, with the accuracy depending on a good distribution of those satellites.
At the moment, the GPS satellites are bunched up in orbit under a policy of launching new satellites next to the craft they are designated to eventually replace. Over the next 24 months, the Air Force will slowly move the satellites apart. That’s because the older satellites are lasting longer than expected, the command said Jan. 7.
Read MoreRockwell-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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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