Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2014 15:07:26 -0400
Reply-To: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Subject: Re: The end of MS Streets & Trips
In-Reply-To: <53b9590e.5127320a.3e24.5d9a@mx.google.com>
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At 10:06 AM 7/6/2014, Rob wrote:
>I have sat in the back of my bus with the laptop turned on, S&T on
>the screen trying to figure out where I wanted to go
And I, but with the DeLorme software. For what it's worth, I can
tell you it works and works well for me, and combined with a
fourteen-inch laptop on a fancy mount (a strip of nylon tent cloth
run through the defrost vents on the dash and the laptop hinge, tied
with a bow) it's a formidable road navigator. As to how it compares
to S&T, I have preferred it, but there's context that informs my choice:
My brother ran both in tandem on a big trip I was part of years ago,
when he first got his RV - we both wished we could combine the parts
we preferred from each, but I ended up sticking with DeLorme and he
with Microsoft. I'd been using a GPS in the van for a while already,
but it was a marine GPS and I was using it to drive marine charting
software that had a US and Canada road database but no interest in
roads as a concept, or a route as other than a specific collection of
waypoints.
The uSoft program, then anyway, made it very difficult to get
detailed info about how the receiver was managing, which
satellites. I hated that. Every GPS receiver by the nature of the
system knows which particular satelllites it should be able to see at
a given moment and the azimuth and elevation to each one, is it
receiving that one, signal strength if so , geometric information It
was my first experience of using GPS that didn't routinely have a
clear line of sight to within a few degrees of the horizon in all
directions, and I really wanted to know how it was going to behave
cooped up in metal and trees and walls. So for me that killed
Streets and Trips. Chris was curious too, but he didn't have my
longstanding relationship with GPS as a strictly line-of-sight system
that was an amazing and much more convenient complement to Loran-C,
but which like Loran C had to be watched like a hawk because if I
trusted it blindly sure as little green apples it would eventually
stick me on a nasty sharp rock in the fog somewhere on the coast of
Maine, and I might very easily die of it.**
Without that vivid context Chris was willing to live with the four
bars or however it was that S&T reported on receiving, so he might be
a better judge than I about the rest of it. We each have had several
versions of our respective choice and we each think ours has improved
a lot from the early times. He does extensive trip planning with the
software in a much more detailed way than I do; he's done a round
trip of the country in a big RV and was within a few hours of his
predicted schedule the pretty much the entire way.
I'm used to driving around with the stuff too now. Automotive GPS
systems know and care about roads, which looked at from my marine
perspective looks like "yeah, and we'll cheat and stick you on a road
even though that's not what the fix says [and you'll die horribly]"
but really means they can tolerate poor reception and inaccurate
fixes by including assumptions about where you plausibly might
be. They almost always are right, and if they get it wrong the
consequences aren't dire. It's a good trade, and I've gotten used to
it. Every once in a while when I start my Garmin Nuvi 750 (high-end
machine of its time, excellent in practically every way, gets power
through the cradle which only their absolute fanciest machine does
now, $50 on ebay) it picks up a position one block away on the
adjoining street to my house, and instead of breaking into a cold
sweat I just shake my finger at it and say tsk tsk.
Yours,
David
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