[OSM-talk] Navman B10 SiRFstarIII receiver - any good?

[D Tucny]

2008/6/20 Christopher Woods <christof at infinitus.co.uk>:

>  This isn't strictly OSM-related, but I do use my Bluetooth GPS unit to
> take tracks with my smartphone, so I suppose it applies. I'm just looking at
> this Navman unit with the SS3 chipset, it's got good reviews and apparently
> it's quite sensitive - but more importantly, is it accurate?
>
> Does the SiRFstar III chipset have a tendency to 'drift' when you're
> travelling at slow velocities (like my SS2-based QStarz receiver does?) I
> think my old receiver gets confused with bounce off high buildings too, so
> I'm wondering whether the SS3 chipset improves on these problems or whether
> it's one to avoid.
>
>

This article gives a good idea of the accuracy of the SS3 chipset...
http://www.gpspassion.com/fr/articles.asp?id=175&page=5

I've had an SS2+ receiver in the form of the tomtom bluetooth box that I
used with my palm, upgrading to a Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx which has an SS3
chipset showed a noticeable improvement... However... even with the SS3
chipset, it does still tend to drift around a lot when walking, a lot more
than when on bike or in a car... it does still get affected by tall
buildings... it does seem to drift/guestimate when it looses view of
satellites, perhaps good for navigating, less good if you actually want
quality tracks... and finally, something that annoys me quite a bit but is
often one of the 'good' points that people mention all the time, it
maintains a lock indoors a lot of the time... this sounds good, but,
realisitically, it's not a very good lock and typically has your location
bouncing hundreds of metres in every direction if not multiple kilometers...
With the garmin devices when they record the tracks they don't store any
sort of quality information in there too so there's no way to filter bad
tracks or bad bits of tracks either...

So, in summary, SS3 > SS2, but, it's not perfect, in the difficult
situations for GPS that you mentioned, it will still have problems, maybe a
bit less than the SS2 though...

Not sure which QStarz receiver you have, but the ones on the wiki seem to be
all MTK based...

d
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