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Three friends and I are nearing a dangerous shipping lane 20 miles out to sea. A light fog blankets the coast, obscuring any landmarks. I whip out my Magellan 2000 XL. It begins locking on to several satellites, and less than a minute later, I turn to my sailing buddies. "I have some good news and some bad news," I say. "The good news is that this thing says it knows exactly where we are. The bad news is that we're 223 feet underwater." From the hype surrounding hand-held GPS units you'd think they were your own portable Kit Carson, always knowing where you are and which way to turn. That's true, to a point. The Magellan's 12-channel receiver picks up satellite signals better than any hand-held I've used. It's virtually waterproof and housed in a tough, rubber-armored case. And once you struggle through its interface a few times, you can get it to spit out neato numbers like distance to destination, bearing to destination, speed over ground, etc. But don't go thinking that you're going to bust out the XL 2000 (or any other inexpensive hand-held for that matter) and find one-stop shopping for the novice navigator. First of all, the military degrades the civilian GPS signal so that it's accurate to within a few hundred yards, rather than a few feet, which is why mine said we were sleeping with the fishes when most assuredly we were several feet above sea level. But more to the point, do most people really grok what it means to be at 34 degrees 24.76 minutes north and 119 degrees 43.52 minutes west? The GPS might know where it is, but is it communicating in a form accessible to most of us? Unless you've got a good topographical map or navigational chart and know how to use it, those numbers don't mean a thing. Basically, this is a great tool for people who already know how to do fairly sophisticated navigation. For a person who's going to charter a bareboat yacht, carry a backup on their private plane, or go on a sea kayaking trip and wants a compact and sturdy personal GPS, this is a great one. It gives you all the basic information you need to help navigate with a compass and chart or to plot a straight-line course for a known set of coordinates. But don't think that you're going to suddenly tool around New York City without getting lost or scramble down the Lhotse Face of Mt. Everest at night without flinching just because you shelled out $99 and packed an extra set of batteries. The XL 2000 might tell you to bear a course of 176 degrees to get back to your car, but it won't tell you that there's a sheer drop off in between or how to get around it. The big leap in this tech will come when hand-held technology becomes inexpensive enough so that every $99 GPS comes with a interchangeable set of topo map and navigational chart RAM cartridges and a plotter display that will make navigation as easy as following the handy map on your screen. It's not far in the future--right now those units (Magellan's NAV 6000, for example) are selling for under a thousand--but until then, hand-held GPS navigation is a lot less simple than most people would like to believe. - Andrew Rice [6/8/98] Other GPS units reviewed on Street Tech:
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