Re: GPS altitude on the 60CSx!

Ed <edATridersiteDOTorg> wrote:

Sam wrote:
Sorry for jumping in...I have been contemplating getting a 60CSX for quite
sometime because of the barometric feature.
Is it safe to say that it's not worth the extra money and is only a "nice to
have" but not practical?

As John says, it's strictly a personal issue. I have used my 76CS for
profiling running courses and cycling routes. It really is ideal for
these purposes. However, I have never used the compass.

As a hillwalker and cyclist I do find the much improved altitude
accuracy and stability of the (correctly used) altimeter models to be
well worth both the price and the extra hassle of starting off at
switch on when you want good altitude with the altimeter
well-calibrated by one means or another.

A less used but worthwhile feature of the altimeter is being able to
use it to check barometric pressure, and look at a graph of recent
barometric changes. Useful when you're camping in the foothills and
want to avoid being hit by bad weather on the summit. You can get
better timing of approaching weather fronts than the general radio
weather reports give.

As for the compass, I just don't see the utility of it. A good compass
can be had for under $30, is light, compact and never likely to fail.
Who needs one in a GPS that will fail when the batteries die?

I find the compass useful in three ways. The first is that the compass
calibration for battery magnetism can also calibrate out the magnetic
effects of any permanent nearby magnetic metal, such as when the
device is mounted in a fixed position on a vehicle. When you stop the
direction derived from GPS movement often goes haywire, so the
direction indicated to a waypoint when stopped at traffic lights is
not reliable, whereas with a calibrated compass it will be. Since I
often do urban navigation just by setting a destination waypoint and
making up the route as I travel just by deciding which turn to take at
junctions based on waypoint direction, this is a useful feature for
me.

The second usefulness is the software extension in the compass models
that allows you to project a waypoint in a direction taken from a
sighting. Two of these gives an effective DIY method of roughly
triangulating a distant landmark graphically in the unit itself.

That's handy when navigating in an area where you don't have a map,
and are making one up as you go using the GPS. You can quickly acquire
a useful layout not only of places you've visited, but also visible
landmarks.

The third usefulness is being able to switch on the compass and have
the display of the hand held unit pan round as you turn round to give
instant visual orientation. You also pan round the long view ahead of
the long axis of the display, instead of finding the features you want
to see cut off in the sides of the display and needing to be viewed
with a more cramped xoom out. In effect it gives you a bigger display,
as though you had the forward direction length extended in all
directions.

None of these are frequently used features, but they're handy enough
when I do use them that I'm glad to have them, and would have paid the
extra price of the S models just to have them.

People complain about the battery eating behaviour of the compass, but
that only happens when you leave the compass operation parameters at
the battery eating factory default settings.

--
Chris Malcolm cam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

.

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