A Very Basic GPS that tries to be more than it is

I was visiting my brother-in-law in North Carolina last month. He is really into GPS devices and an activity called geocaching. My wife and I tried it while we were there with him and we were hooked. I wanted to get a GPS, but didn't want to spend a lot of money on it. My brother-in-law told me at minimum to make sure it has a compass with it, and having maps on the GPS doesn't hurt either. He said this because he has an old low-level Garmin Etrex that doesn't have this and he finds it a pain to keep walking around to figure out what direction he's going.

I saw the Whistler Galileo Elite 200 GPS on EBay brand new for $89+shipping. The item included a 90-day warranty with a 3-year extended warranty for an extra $10. The features included a compass, detailed maps on the GPS itself and 45 ft. accuracy. The latter is not great but I figured it was a cheap GPS to begin with and I'd make do.

I can't say that I'm totally disappointed, but I really do believe now that "you get what you pay for". If you are not in an extremely open area, the device takes up to 15 minutes to "warm up" and find satellites, which I have heard is pretty poor. It also didn't keep it's lock well in any car I tried it in unless I had the device pressed against a window. I did buy an external antenna for about $25 on eBay that has helped, but I've been told you shouldn't need to do that.

Now for the detailed maps. The device comes with a 32MB compact flash card to download maps from their software and improve over the extremely basic maps that comes with the 16MB of memory. But it is not nearly as intuitive as I thought. First off, you do not simply "install the CD", you create the directories on your own and copy the files there and then manually create the icon and Program Files entry. The instruction booklet does tell you how to do this, but this seems very very crude.

Then, it can take hours to download the maps with the USB cable. You can improve this by buying a compact flash reader, but it is very hard to get the card in and out of the GPS. One time I actually had to use pliers to get the card out, which can't be good for either the card or the reader.

You can only download one set of maps, and the next time you download, it erases that set and creates a new one. The instructions do not tell you this and it is very annoying to find out. And you cannot go on the web and download more maps like you can with a Garmin or Magellan unit, you can only use the maps that Whistler provides.

A final annoyance is accessories. The device has buttons for an external antenna and an AC adapter, but the Whistler website does not sell these options, and they can be very hard to find if you don't know what to look for (for example, the AC Adapter can be bought at Target or Wal-Mart, but you have to know the size of the jack in the GPS and it has to be a 3V to 12V AC/DC converter). For the external antenna, you have to make sure the jack is "straight through" and not "right angle", because the jack is too deeply recessed for the latter to connect.

The device is not a complete waste, however. Once you get the lock, it works pretty well. I find most of the figures to be surprisingly accurate. Some comparisons of the lat/long numbers I got vs. looking on maps showed I was more like 5-15 ft. off than 45. In my car, I took a trip with the cruise control set at 65 mph and the speed it showed was always between 64-66. The compass was perfectly accurate as well. The one case where the numbers tended to be off was "elevation/altitude". The instructions warn you that you can be up to 100 ft. off in either direction and the numbers can change wildly and I sometimes (but not all the time) saw that happen. I live near the coast and found that sometimes it would show me as being up to 100 ft. below sea level! But other times it would show me a stable number that I would look up and find to be fairly accurate. The "bread crumbs" feature that lets you backtrack your steps is usually only found in GPS devices costing 3-5 times as much.

I think part of the issue is that Whistler is not really a GPS maker, they are a famous hi-quality maker of radar/laser detectors and this was probably kind of a cute "side device" for them to sell to their loyal radar detector users. In fact, this is the only GPS they make. But they are very good regarding contacting them, they immediately told me how to find an AC adapter.

So my advice to others is that if this is the only "featured" device you can afford, the features are still worth the purchase, but otherwise you can do a lot better with a mid-range or higher Garmin or Magellan unit.