Comments on: Gripes from a grumpy GPS user

By: 3 More GPS Satellites Will Help Hikers Stay on Path | Hiking and Backpacking tips, tools and resources | Trailsauce

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:50:41 +0000

[...] 3 More GPS Satellites Will Help Hikers Stay on Path url='http://trailsauce.com/3-more-gps-satellites-will-help-hikers-stay-on-path/';As any frustrated GPS-toting hiker can attest, we’ve come a long way in the location-aware department. But there’s plenty of room for improvement, both with hardware and GPS software. [...]

By: Lex Blagus

Lex Blagus — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:58:47 +0000

Dave,
I entirely agree with you. Your text made 2 points:

1. Hiking GPS concepts and terms are hard to understand. I think routes are just useless, and every person I ever teach about GPS, I told: “forget this”. Another GPS software I use and like more than others is the GPS TrackMaker. Give it a try. Is not perfect, but so much better than other ones I gave a try. But for advanced operations, you have to be a software engineer.

2. Digital maps aren’t part of our reality. Specially here in Brazil. GPS manufactures such Garmin still thinks in business models of last decade. Digital maps are surelly a great way to make money, as soon as an open standart benefit everyone to exchange their own maps. Or maybe, like here in Brazil, having an open-source project to digitalize everything (using GPS TrackMaker by the way).

ps.: great blog, I am following it…

By: meatball (trailsauce, yo)

meatball (trailsauce, yo) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:16:26 +0000

3 Points:

1. I like this angry version of you. Very pithy and fun to read. Now get some coffee you miserable Litizian!
2. Is there anything more annoying than branding that requires an exclamation point? First there was Yahoo!, now there’s TOPO! Makes me want to vomit my recently consumed Cheerios.
3. Since the companies probably make so little margin on the units themselves (if any margin at all), it’s in their best interest, seemingly, to make the maps and their use proprietary and arbitrarily expensive. However, judging by your’s and others’ frustration, it seems a pretty shoddy long term strategy, and all it will take is one company (Google?) to come in and eventually offer equal-if-not-better quality maps and software for free for the whole thing to blow up in their collective faces. Just my $.02.