NOTE: Advanced electronics are great tools for those who like gadgets. However, don't rely entirely on electronic equipment when it comes to ensuring your safety... always carry a map and good 'ole fashion compass and know how to use 'em!

In addition to having a traditional compass, there are several useful reasons to carry a GPS on your next outdoor recreational adventure:

• If you worry about getting lost, mark waypoints of notable landmarks along the trail as one way to find your way home. At minimum, many people mark the location of where they parked.
• If you find a play area that's hard to find, create a waypoint to help lead the way on your next visit.
• If you are struggling to find a route from point A to point B, mark waypoints at home using a mapping program like Topo, upload them to the GPS, then go out and play connect-the-dots.
• If you read about cool places or hear about popular destinations, getting GPS coordinates can help next time you're in that area.
• If you get into trouble or find someone who needs help, providing exact location using GPS coordinates might just save a life.

Below is my personal experience with various GPS units I've used in the past. Whether I'm snowmobiling, riding ATVs, backpacking or scouting out logging roads, I always have a GPS with me. It's set to collect track data this is later downloaded into mapping software to see where I've been and help me figure out where I still want to go.

Garmin Rino 130
This combo GPS/2-way radio should be the cat's meow this season! (I just got it this summer.) What appealed to me the most were 10,000 tracklog points with several different settings to maximize how often it records your position. That should alleviate the "45-mile problem" I've had to deal with using the Summit.

It's also waterproof and I liked the idea of 24MB of built-in memory for loading helpful basemap data. I'm playing with Garmin's "Roads and Recreation" software that may offer the road and trail detail I've always wanted as a basemap on the GPS. We'll see..

I'll update this page as the snow falls and I get a chance to take the Rino out to play.

Garmin eTrex Summit
During the 2001-02 riding season, I upgraded to the eTrex Summit as a way to resolve the 1,500 tracklog point limitation found with the basic eTrex. While the Summit doesn't allow you to set when it records your position either, it does have the ability to store twice as much track data (3,000 points) as the basic eTrex model. As a result, I was originally hoping this model would do the job capturing the majority of our trips without any interaction from me while out on the trail (our rides are usually between 60-80 miles).

Simple logical told me, calculated on the behavior of the basic eTrex, that we should get about 100 miles out of the Summit before it starts to overwrite... unfortunately, that's not the case. The Summit manages to waste away 3,000 points in the same 50 miles!! Again, that's 2x the eTrex... Although Garmin provides firmware updates to fix certain problems, so far none of them up to v2.40 have addressed or minimized this waste. This continues to be a major disappointment as it perpetuates two problems: the first is obvious, you overwrite track data way too quickly. The second is a result of the first and can be much more serious- it completely blows the TrackBack feature.

The best way we found to get around the first problem is to save your tracks before the active track log meter reaches 99%. Since you can store up to 20 separate track logs, there are two tricks for making this work: 1) remember to do this on the trail somewhere between the 35-40 mile mark just to be on the safe side and 2) after you save the active log, immediately clear the active log since it is only a duplicate of what you just saved. I should also note here that we have not noticed any loss in track point detail whatsoever after downloading saved logs into our topo software. If there is any loss during the save, it hasn't been data we've cared about for our purposes. As for working around the second problem, I guess the advise is... don't get lost (unless you can reload saved logs to use in TrackBack mode - something we haven't needed to try).

Satellite tracking with the Summit is as good as the basic eTrex (not to mention I found a new/better way to carry this device on my pack). Battery life is maximized on this model by turning off the built-in electronic compass. Since we don't necessarily use the GPS for directional purposes while snowmobiling, this really isn't a feature we miss. We also haven't noticed that the built-in barometric altimeter impacts battery consumption in any way.

As with the basic eTrex, built-in memory to load basemaps is also not available on the Summit. This has not yet been an issue for us since the only basemaps I'd want to load for snowmobiling would need to include Washington State Forest Service roads. ...and I don't believe that kind of road detail exists in any software package available on the market today.

Lastly, it might be helpful to pan around the screen with the 'Click Stick' that's available on other eTrex models. Having this feature would help us check our proximity against a waypoint or route that may be set as a marker or destination however, this doesn't seem to be a big deal for us either. In fact, not having this feature maintains the adventure side of riding by allowing us to figure out where we are on the trails and then compare that to what we download later against the mapping software. Although, there has been a time or two where I've uploaded a detailed series of waypoints from TOPO! for a specific destination and then played "connect the dots" out on the trail.

Garmin eTrex
I got into the Garmin eTrex line pretty much by accident. My neighbor was selling his basic eTrex for $50. At first, this plam-sized device didn't look like it could do much but I figured this was a great opportunity to experiment with my own GPS and return the borrowed Garmin III.

The basic eTrex is a great little unit and offered everything we needed with only one exception. This model stores only 1,500 tracklog points with no way to set how often it records one. From our experience, this amounts to about 50 miles worth of track data even with the firmware version that is supposed to prevent excessive track points from being recorded (v2.11). If you ride any longer than 1,500 points worth, tracklog data is overwritten on a FIFO basis - not good if you're wanting to bring home every place you may have explored while on your trip.

Other than that, battery life is much less of a problem with the eTrex. On a pair of fresh AA batteries, we can do about 6-7 hours of riding before having to worry about swapping out new ones. That's still no where near the estimated 22 hours stated in the product documentation but I suppose Garmin isn't taking cold weather conditions into consideration here (like most product advertising, the best case scenario is what typically gets promoted).

The eTrex also seems to do a pretty good job maintaining a strong signal on at least six or more satellites at any given time (most of the time it's fixed on ten). Since the antenna on the eTrex is located behind the Garmin logo on the front of these models, I use a Garmin neoprene case that hooks onto my pack. I try to position the unit at the very top of the shoulder strap so the antenna is always pointing upwards. We've noticed that tracks downloaded into TOPO! from the eTrex are much cleaner and far more consistent than we ever captured from the III.

Garmin III
I started mapping snowmobile trails toward the end of our 2000-01 riding season with a Garmin III borrowed from a friend. For the most part, this model worked pretty good with only two complaints after a few times of use: 1) battery life and 2) the ability to keep a consistent fix on the satellites.

Even though all the product documentation says the III does 36 hours of battery life, I was lucky to get 4 hours before having to swap out four new AA's to continue mapping most of our rides. The worst part was if the batteries went dead before remembering to check/change them, you'd lose all your waypoints, routes and recorded tracks (this happened to me only once!). I've considered using a handlebar or dashboard mount and hard wiring the GPS into the electrical system on the snowmobile, but haven't tried that yet. I dug around the Internet and found a wiring diagram with some additional information however, I have not personally applied or tested this schematic.

The other thing I noticed often with the Garmin III was the unit's inability to keep a solid fix on the birds up above. Almost everytime tracks were downloaded into TOPO!, we'd find too many gaps in the data where the GPS obviously lost the signal. I've even made sure to carry the unit with the antenna pointing straight up on every trip. Yeah, yeah, yeah... I know tree cover and such plays a factor here but some of the newer models, like the eTrex, seem to do a far better job tracking the satellites in our opinion. After talking with people in various newsgroups (like sci.geo.satellite-nav), they felt these problems may only exist on the first units produced. I might consider going back and trying a III+ sometime.