Hand Help GPS - Another Question

[ShaggyRS6]

For those of you who have a Hand Held GPS, do you know if you can plot areas on them. What i would like to do is plot my permissions and then know when i am straying from them. Any ideas if this can be done?

[Hunter]

Garmin units can be programmed to bleep when you are say 1mile away from a center point marked on the gps. (proximity warning function). Im litterly about to but Garmins new unit (now in use by the SAS) which is the Garmin GPS 60CSX *drool* im not sure if that has such functions or not.

 

I think you would need a PDA type gps for things like that, rather then a standard handheld.

[AdamC]

You can buy some relatively inexpensive GPS devices in which you can program virtual fences. The are very simple with no screen, and are designed for parents to give their kids instead of a mobile phone. You put a SIM card in it and it is programed just to text or phone certain numbers in emergencys along with giving up GPS location.

 

Forgot to mention, think Maplin are selling a device such as this.

 

Failing that if you are running GPS on a Plam PC, there might be an app around that can do what you want.

Edited February 17, 2008 by AdamC

[ShaggyRS6]

Ok, thanks. I basically want this info on a GPS machine

[Hunter]

Do you really need a GPS on a plot that size?

 

Unless of course its for night time use which would help.

What you can do, is plot an area on the Garmin units, or on the PC. What I would do is walk/drive the full perimiter with the unit switched to track record, then turn it off at the end. You will then have a simple dotted line around your land, and you can simply check the screen, zoom in or out, to see if you are still inside the dotted perimiter line. I dont think you can get audio to tell you if you leave it, but it would work if you looked now and then at the screen. Eventually you will get used to the area, even at night.

[ShaggyRS6]

Thanks Hunter. That was just an example I have a few that are complicated.

 

So which garmin aloows you to do the dotted line thing?

[pin]

Most decent handheld units will allow you to record waypoints or even activate a tracking function which you could do, then walk the boundry. Look at Memory Map. You take your saved gps "track" from the device via serial / usb and shove that data into memory map and it will overlay it onto a proper OS map.