vancouver bc boat show (and new hardware seen)
Dave Martindale
>how many people here went??
I was there on Sunday, the only day I was in town. I saw brochures for
the Garmin 12CX, but no units - perhaps they were all sold out. I saw
a GPS III+ in the flesh at the Nikka booth, but it was turned off and
behind glass. And the Nikka "GPS guy", Brad, was swamped with people
the several times I went by the booth, so I didn't get to talk to him.
I also noticed that Magellan has a bunch of new GPSes in the little
Pioneer/Blazer case. There is the 300, which seems to be a Pioneer
upgraded to 12 channel receiver, or a Blazer 12 with a few features
deleted, depending on how you look at it. The 300 also appears to
have a dot-matrix display, unlike the Pioneer and Blazer, but doesn't
make use of it to provide a "map" display.
Then there are the 315 and 320, which do provide a "map" display (no
surface mapping, just waypoints and tracks and stuff) on their 104x160
pixel LCD. These also have more memory: 500 waypoints, 20 routes with
30 legs. There's a serial port for DGPS in, NMEA out, data upload/download.
Both also have a built-in database of cities, and the 320 includes
nautical navaids as well. The 320 has a few other features that
the 315 lacks.
These new units (315/320) seem to have most of the features of the
Tracker, with a higher resolution LCD, in a tiny package that gets
15 hours of operation from *two* AA cells.
I also saw the Garmin 720 - it's a marine band transceiver (radio).
No GPS included. It puts out 3 watts on 6 alkaline cells; a NiCd
pack is optional. It's supposed to be completely waterproof. Looks
like an interesting competitor to the Icom M3 - same price, same
power options, a bit less RF output, but it's significantly smaller
and lighter.
Dave