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weaponlight said:
Kayaking, with water and green trees all around? Sounds heavenly. Let us know 60 performs on the river.
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Well here's a take. Loaded up all the maps on friday morning, packed up and prepared. SInce this time I was taking women and children I had to double check everything and go over it a thrid time just in case. It was few people first trip so I needed to make sure it is all good.
But GPS:
On the road: great placment and positioning but taking a lower level of the bridge caused it to loose signal. Heavy tree cover during country drive caused to loose signal. Retarded route picking no way to avoid things. There was a bridge closed until 8 am and we couldn't get thru so I went as detour was shown. GPS kept prompting me to make a u-turn at every possible exit and than it switched to a different route. Otherwise not much complains on the road. But this is also where 56 megs of storage became a problem. While there I found out about a small house for sale. I was looking to buy something around woods, water and skiing places no further than 3-4 hrs from NYC. I guess it had to belong to a different quadrant since gps couldnt find the town. It would have been nice if there was more memory in there.
On the river: Excellent recpetion on the water with accuracy to 9 feet. Pretty much everything worked just fine except while in the woods. Again the tree cover made it little unstable while moving. When you stopped everything worked out just fine. I had it strapped to my life vest and one of the girls used it as a floatation device when I was cooking. After swimming with it for an hour I calmly walked over to her and removed my camera and my gps from her pocket. Score is: Garmin 1 and Panasonic 0. My friends Magellan gps took a one minute dunk and is dead so bravo for Garmin.
Also something that surprised me: Inova 24/7 waterproof light was not so waterproof. Well the battery compartment is sort of waterproof. It keep the water in and prevent from leaking out quite good /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif
Things I want for my gps system:
1) Screen protector
2) Neoprene soft tight fiting case
3) External antena
4) Clip it system ( well I had those custom made comming from Iraq /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
)
It is a good unit and I wont complain much. For the money it works just fine. Plus it was really cool trying to explain all the nature to two kids and my Barbie girlfriend + friends. And of course questions like these never get old: so tomorrow we go up river? where are the toilets? what you mean there are no showers? what you need a fire for? are we there yet? will bears eat us? what is jackalope? what is trouser snake? you gonna eat that? why are you boiling water from the river? can I borrow your ________ ?(fill blank with knife, flashlight, fork, mug, lighter, etc, etc), can you go to the store and pick up more marshmellows? Is this poison ivy? (holding poison ivy in his hand). I usually keep my group to the minimum and only my seasoned friends are going and we usually bring so little that when the see my name on the reservation sheet instead of transport bus they send only a pick up with a trailer. This time I had so much stuff that I was ashamed. I need to have another detoxifing trip soon.
