Matthew Dickerson, Addison Independent, May 27, 1999 (reprinted by permission)
I've mentioned before that one of the burdens of writing an outdoor column is the "research": taking up new sports, testing products, exploring new rivers. All in the interest of keeping readers informed, of course. This year, for example, I bought a compound bow and took up bow-hunting. I also made the sacrifice of angling for trout in five different states--an achievement I would be more proud of if I had succeeded in catching trout in all of them. As it was, I had to settle for an .800 batting average.
It was my final outing, a Thanksgiving trip to North Carolina where I spent a day fishing the Davidson River with my older brother Ted, where I failed to land anything. The excursion did, however, provide an opportunity to research the last in my three-part series on technology for the weekend explorer.
Those who have read about handheld GPS units and about the maps now available on CD-ROM (including 3D maps of the entire state) may wonder what happens when you put those two technologies together. Over a 16 hour drive to North Carolina with 3 boys under the age of 10, I had a chance to find out. We left on Friday after school. Pulling out of our driveway, I placed on my dashboard a small yellow GPS receiver: the Delorme Earthmate. The Earthmate was plugged into a laptop computer on which was loaded Street Atlas 7.0, one of several software packages from DeLorme that communicates with the receiver. Within two minutes the unit was initialized and there popped up on my computer a detailed color street map of Middlebury showing our location heading into town on Quarry Road. I had seen ads for rental cars with built-in navigators, but this was my first experience with one. For the next several minutes my kids and I sat transfixed--my wife was driving--as a series of green arrows on the computer screen highlighted with frightening accuracy our current position as we navigated through town.
Now this was an all-or-nothing experiment. We had no paper road maps. Only Street Atlas. We also had no hotel reservations and no concrete plans other than two days of driving. So the next step was to type in our destination (Weaverville, NC) and to set preferences for how fast we drive and what types of roads we like. Ten seconds later, written directions for the entire trip appeared on the left side of the screen. Our route was also highlighted on the map on the right side of the screen, and an eerie computer voice told us that in one minute we need to turn south on route 30. We followed our progress on computer for about an hour. During that time I experimented with several features of the software. The map window can be zoomed to any of several hundred levels of detail, all the way from the entire country to just a few hundred feet of road. If you happen to wander off course--yes, this did happen to us twice--the software will warn you and automatically recompute your route (saving you the indignity of asking for directions).
Of equal interest, Street Atlas has over 3 million "points of interest" (POI's) in its database. These include hotels, restaurants, and other businesses as well as national parks. On the first night when we began to tire of driving, I typed a few keys and the software displayed all the hotels within 1 mile of the highway. We picked a likely candidate a suitable distance up the road and we had our lodging. The next day we promised the kids a mid-day break. After two and a half hours driving the software located a zoo just off the highway in Hershey, PA. (It also located Chocolate World just around the corner from the zoo.)
As for the quality of directions, they were far superior to those produced by either of the programs (MapQuest and Zip2) I found on the web. (MapQuest couldn't even find Bristol VT.) Both of these on-line map & directions programs gave me directions from Middlebury to Albany, New York that I knew to be vastly inferior to other routes.
The only real drawback with the combination of Earthmate and Street Atlas was the limitation of battery time. The Earthmate runs about 10 hours on 4 AAA batteries which is sufficient. However my portable computer doesn't go much longer than two. (I ended up taking it into restaurants with me and recharging while I ate.) This wasn't too serious since once we got on Interstate 81 heading south there wasn't much navigating to do. Nonetheless, unless you have a power adapter for a car you won't be able to leave the computer running continuously on a long trip.
The entire package including both the GPS receiver and software lists for about $159 from DeLorme and can be found at www.delorme.com.
additional notes: At the time of this writing, version 7.0 of Street Atlas was available for Windows 95,98, or NT. For Macintosh, they are still on version 6.0 which does not have quite as many features. The Earthmate GPS unit is available for either platform. It should be noted that (unlike traditional handheld GPS units) the Earthmate cannot be used alone as a GPS. It is a receiver only, and has not user interface.