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by myself248 800 days ago
> definitely useless for road navigation

I would disagree strongly with this. I took a roadtrip in 1999 using a Delorme Earthmate Hyperformance GPS receiver, the RS-232 version, plugged into a Toughbook running Delorme Street Atlas USA, I believe it was version 6.0.

It provided perfectly usable directions all the way across the country. It didn't do lane guidance (which I don't find terribly helpful anyway), but some time in advance of every turn, it would announce the turn, including the street name.

That version even had voice recognition, so you could say things like "are we there yet?" and it would announce the ETA to both the next stop and the final destination, along with current location. Lots of fun!

30 meters (typical worst-case CEP under SA) is plenty accurate for road navigation in all but the densest areas, and even then, just glance at the map. Once you're out on the open road, it's brilliant. Rock out to some mp3's until the voice pipes up with the next maneuver.
1 comments
aspenmayer 800 days ago
> Delorme Earthmate Hyperformance GPS receiver, the RS-232 version

I have one of these, but don’t really know how useful it is or what I can do with it, but like all of my random antique hardware, I don’t really have any good reason to part with it either.

Do you have any ideas for what to do with it?

For that matter, what is a good GPS unit in modern times?

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myself248 800 days ago
It's a SiRFstar chipset and speaks the SiRF binary protocol, not standard NMEA0183, so it was difficult to use it for anything else back in the day. Apparently there's a simple command to put it into NMEA mode, but I think that's not preserved across power cycles or something? It was a long time ago... I'm tempted to snag one off eBay and go on a roadtrip down memory lane.

These days, it depends on what you're doing with it, but it's hard to go wrong with this thing that claims to have a U-Blox 8-series chipset:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32816656706.html

Uniquely among such cheap receivers, that unit can even be configured to report raw data, and is thus the darling of the Galmon project for low-cost observers starting up. Also fun if you want to play with (single-band) RTK, etc.

(Dual-band has gotten "affordable", by which I mean "under a kilodollar", which is tremendous given where it was just a few years ago, but you'd probably know if you had a use for dual-band.)

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