Customer Reviews

A GPS User Manual: Working With Garmin Receivers

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'm enjoying this book. If you are interested in playing around with Garmin GPS devices (GPS is a sort of hobby for many), you probably want to get it, and the 4 star rating is for you. However, if you want a book about GPS in general or about brands other than Garmin, this isn't the book you want.
Much of the book amounts to a more detailed owner's manual than what Garmin gives you. It covers handheld units pretty well but is not intended for other GPS device categories like aviation. In covering many different models, it also accomplishes a lot of comparison between their user interfaces and other features. I like that it does a better job than Garmin's manuals of explaining how to think about the user interface - that is, the strategy behind it.
There's also info on using Garmin software, and some explanitory info on things like DGPS and WAAS, the NMEA interface, external antennas, and similar related stuff. There's an entire chapter on secret keystroke sequences that access undocumented abilities (not that these are all that powerful). I would have liked more of this ancilliary information, more depth and variety, but did appreciate what there was.
One unusual downside: this book may have the most typo's of any I've read. I bet there's about one per page, of the sort where another word is substituted ("use" instead of "user", "you" instead of "your") as if they only used a spell check. But that hasn't interfered much with using it.

I bought this so I could learn more about my etrex vista C. The book is a little out of date for the more recent GPSrs but is still generally applicable. I did learn many things from it. One thing, though, is that it tries to cover a very wide range of units, this leads to a lot of variations in the instructions and it gets pretty repetitive. There are also a large number of typos in the book. Things like "you" instead of "your" and "an" instead of "and." They clearly used a spell checker but didn't have the benefit of a good proofreader. This really didn't take too much away from the value of the book but it didn't improve it either.

If you have a Garmin handheld then I would recommend this book.

By the title of this manual I assumed that the book would cover the Garmin GPSMap 60CS. It did not! Therefore the twenty five bucks that I spent was wasted and all I have now is another dust collector.

A large waste of time for 26xx series and other plug in receivers, not badly written for the target audience, just NOT for plug in units at all. Too bad the title page was NOT better written.

This book is too much text and with 300 pages only has 37 pictures of very poor dot matrix quality. No step by step instructions. Much reading, very little learning.

This book explains clearly what GPS is, and throws in all of the when's, how's and what's. I learned more by reading a few pages of Dale Depriest's work than reading chapters in other GPS pubs.

Well worth your money; go fot it!

(I use the Garmin Rino 530 GPS Navigator with 2-Way Radio.)