[OSM-talk] Choice of GPS for bicycle use in London

[Christian van den Bosch]

Emil Vaughan wrote:

> I'm not clear on what would be the best for osm, as this will probably
> be the only thing I use it for.

I've been using an eTrex Vista with handlebar mount here in Cork, 
Ireland; mostly it works quite well, but is pretty useless on narrow 
streets, especially given Garmin's stupid, stupid, stupid "oh. I've lost 
signal. let's extrapolate track log points according to the course and 
velocity at the moment I lost signal".

This might not sound like a big deal, but in the city I most often lose 
signal when turning a corner into a narrow street, so the Garmin 
extrapolates according to some course being followed mid-turn, resulting 
in a nice plausible-looking straight line of completely bogus points.

The Garmin's NMEA output at least tells the truth, but still gives very 
little useful data on narrow streets, so I've just picked up a Sirf Star 
III-based Holux 213 for $35 on eBay. This should by all accounts work 
happily in the depths of my backpack, where I can hook it up to some 
small device like a PDA, subnote or perhaps a Linksys NSLU2. You 
mentioned a Zaurus - you wouldn't have a good (cheap, reliable) source?

Cheers,

Christian / cjb

http://www.cjb.ie/