Friday, April 1, 2011

DeLorme Earthmate GPS Receiver (Electronics)


This review is from: DeLorme Earthmate GPS Receiver (Electronics)


I like the DeLorme Street Atlas software and also their Topo software. They have problems, but they are servicable and I can recommend them.

However, with respect to the EarthMate GPS receiver device, I am afraid that I have to agree with the review below of Ray Butler from Hudson Mass. I was profoundly disappointed in this product. It basically does not work, and I can only characterize it as an expensive piece of crap. Let me explain.

I already owned an inexpensive Garmin eTrex hand-held GPS device before I bought the EarthMate. But because I was about to embark on a long road trip and wanted to track my progress while travelling I decided to "upgrade" to the EarthMate, which is a more expensive device, a year newer, and is recommended by DeLorme. Unfortunately, I had nothing but trouble with it, and wish I had simply bought the data cable for the Garmin eTrex instead. Here are my complaints about the EarthMate.

1) The EarthMate is EXTREMELY slow to get a satellite fix even under excellent sky visibility conditions--if, indeed, it EVER gets one at all. It never takes less that 5-10 minutes, whereas the Garmin takes at most 2 minutes. And the feedback during the process of getting a fix is terrible. It often spends a long time reporting "No GPS"--a message that I do not understand. I thought it meant that no GPS data was making it to the laptop, and hence spent an inordinate amount of time checking batteries, cables, serial port status and other possible hardware problems before noticing that sometimes it spontaneously progressed from the "No GPS" status to the "No fix" status on its way to eventually getting a fix, and thus the problem wasn't hardware at all.

While it is trying to get a fix it can display a table of information related to the satellites it is listening to; but as there is zero documentation sold with the EarthMate, I have no idea what the various table entries mean, or what many of the error messages mean either.

2) Even when the EarthMate does manage to get a satellite fix, it loses it so easily that it is almost useless. I drove 200 miles through the Bitterroot mountains with the EarthMate on the roof of the car, and I would say that the EarthMate was lost about 3/4 of the time. If you pass a row of trees on the side of the road, it loses the fix. If you go through a canyon or past a hill, it gets lost. If you pass a row of buildings in an urban area or pull under the overhang of a gas station it gets lost. Even if you just do a quick 180 and backtrack a way, it usually loses the fix. I am not exaggerating! And when this happens, your only recourse is to find a spot with optimal sky conditions and sit still for 5-10 minutes. By contrast, the eTrex, which was located INSIDE the car on the same trip (a much poorer receiving location, though more convenient) never once lost its fix under any of these conditions! And it both costs less, and has the enormous advantage of a small display, which means it is useful without a laptop!

3) The integration of the EarthMate with the DeLorme software is poor. It was clearly an add-on, and not designed in from the beginning, so there are numerous deficiencies. For example, it seems to have only a small amount of memory devoted to storing the recent trajectory you have travelled. It periodically throws away the recent track and starts afresh, which means you cannot have it plot all of a lengthy trip; nor can you save the track information in a file, or at least I have been unable to figure out how.

While it is plotting arrows on the map to mark your track, the arrows often go behind another window (e.g. the map legend) and you cannot see them until you move the offending window (a dicey operation while driving--don't try it!). The DeLorme software should be able to automatically translate either the map or the other windows so that your current location is always visible on the screen. It should also be able to dynamically rotate the map so that your direction of progress is always "up" (or "right", if you so choose) on the laptop screen. And it should be able to constantly display besides your speed, altitude, direction of travel, the estimated time and distance to next waypoint, and other trip-related data. Other GPS devices can do all this inside a handheld; but the DeLorme system cannot accomplish it even with all of the computational resources of a laptop! I can only characterize the EarthMate software as a feature-poor afterthought to the Street Atlas and Topo software.

In summary: the disastrously poor performance of the EarthMate, its mediocre software support, its comparatively high price, and the poor customer service by DeLorme reported by other reviewers, suggest that you should save your money or buy a different GPS device.
DeLorme Earthmate GPS Receiver (Electronics) at amazon.com

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)