Street Pilot III Deluxe

February 06, 2003, 06:52:58 pm

Would appreciate any opinions by folks who use this system. Ease of use? Is it complete or are other add-ons needed? How often do you have to download info to the unit from your computer? Does it help in your travels? How useful in finding parks, restaurants, fuel, etc? Any other info.

Re: Street Pilot III Deluxe

Reply #1 – February 06, 2003, 07:16:02 pm

Yahoo Message Number: 4064

I have been using SP III for 10 months and have been very pleased. The deluxe edition provides more memory on the chip than the base model. If you are using it in multiple locations, you may want to consider additional temporary as opposed to permanent mounts. I purchased the bean bag as well, but in a sudden stop the unit moves. The 128mb of memory on one chip will provide a large area to be down loaded and with the USB port, this can be done quickly. If you don't have a USB port on your computer you may want to rethink buying Garmin, since using the serial port can take hours to down load from computer to unit. I have 2 64 mb chips and I have my local area on one, Entire state of Georgia, and portions of South carolina, NC and Tennessee as well as North Florida. 128 could probably handle a 1/4 of US unless you live in NE or So Calif :-) When traveling out of area, you only need to down load areas where you'll be spending time. All major US highways are built into the system, but be forewarned that interchanges i.e. several interstates intersecting are shown, but detail is not exact and you could miss an off ramp:-) We traveled 6000 miles this summer cross country and never looked at a map, but did miss some exits that we had not downloaded the area to.
To learn all the nuances can be cumbersome and I'm still making errors trying multiple way points and using the system to its full capability. I now basically put in a location (find) and it takes me there with incredible accuracy. It could use more campground info, but for the money, portability and functions are one of the best on the market. Garmin's customer support is excellent. I had a glitch in software and they spent literally hours and sent replacement modules on several occasions to try to correct an error in my USB/Gateway and Windows XP conflicts.
You will need to buy the extender to place the antennae in your window from its location attached to the unit. The color is superb, the voice prompts are clear. We bought ours on line from http://www.gpsdiscount.com and at the time they were the most competitive price.
GPS is great, I don't know what we did with out it for all these years and I sure could have used the technology when I was leading patrols in the boonies :-). But don't forget your mapping skills, we need redundancies and the most important reason to buy a GPS, no more fights with the wife, who can't ever figure out where we are and where we are supposed to go :-)

Steve Bloom

rheavn wrote:

Re: Street Pilot III Deluxe

Reply #2 – February 07, 2003, 10:20:51 am

Yahoo Message Number: 4065

I don't have a GPS yet, but while researching the various products, I discovered a new product that might be worth considering. It is the Navman icn 630 and uses the same mapping as found in BMW's etc. A side by side comparison can be viewed at http://www.teamgps.com/navman/default.asp One drawback is that it won't be available until mid March.
Ken '02 Allure 30711

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