GPS Tuner V5.0
Posted by Jack Cook on 12/27/06 in GPS, Mobilitysite Reviews
Author: Elrendhel
Vendor: www.gpstuner.com
Cost: $34 for Standard (1Year Free Upgrades),
$24 for Basic (no Upgrades), and
$48 for GEO (Area calculation plus 1Year Free Upgrades).
Rating: 4.7 out of 5
The last “off-road” GPS solution you will ever need!
INTRODUCTION:
GPS Tuner is THE application for any of the various "off-road" situations where you might find yourself needing GPS info, such as hiking, Geocaching, cycling, boating (fishermen will LOVE this tool to find their favorite fishing spot quickly and accurately), and even in the hobby of flying (although you should only consider it’s use as a backup to your existing instrumentation!). You can, of course, use it for on-road navigation, but it was primarily designed for off-road use.
OVERVIEW:
When you drive around with an “On Road” GPS solution, it normally wants to display your location as being on a known road listed on the map. But what do you do when you have literally hit the end of the road? Maybe the road continues on, but as an unmarked road. Or as a hiking trail. Or maybe it dead-ends into a boat ramp for lake access. Here is where your “On Road” GPS solution is going to fail, because most On Road solutions cannot conceive of your need to leave the paved road.
PRODUCT CLAIMS:
“GPS Tuner is an off-road navigation software for Pocket PC devices. While most car navigation software gives you the possibility of planning your route based on a road network, GPS Tuner gives you the ability of navigation where and when the roads end. GPS Tuner is an excellent tool for hiking, geocaching, boating, flying, driving and many other sporting activities.”
REVIEWER’S FINDINGS:
I use GPS Tuner along with the same GPS receiver (OnCourse BT-339) that I received when I purchased my “On Road” solution over a year ago, and it works perfectly well with it. All I had to do was download and install the GPS Tuner application in order to begin enjoying the benefits of “off-road” GPS. I currently use it for hiking and Geocaching, which is a great pastime for those who like to keep active.
I found the application to be highly accurate, and includes an intuitive interface which allows the user to jump right into using the program. The auto-detect mechanism is very accurate and reliable, continually finding my hardware when-ever I updated the program as a Beta Tester, and in it’s current incarnation as the new v5.0K (currently on revision “K” as of this writing).
The only downside which most users might be concerned about is the lack of bundled maps. While there is a global map provided, it is a very low resolution picture, and should only ever be used to confirm that your GPS reflects you are located in the correct country. You can of course zoom-in to confirm your location relative to your city’s approximate location, but herein lies the another downside to the program: because the map is a raster image (just a JPG picture), it pixelates more and more the further you zoom in, where as a vector-based map would provide more and more details the further-in you zoomed.
I feel that this issue is mostly offset by the fact that Megalith provides users with a free utility program which allows the user to import maps from any number of sources, and even provides the ability to optionally download Expedia maps for free. The vector-based maps that are utilized by the “On Road” solutions are generally dependant on licensed map-data provided by third party vendors, and this data can be out-of-date more often than not. Additionally, added cost of maps from these Map vendors affects your total purchase price of the “On Road” solution. This point is moot when using GPS Tuner, where you can download maps for free!
SOME GREAT ADDITIONAL FEATURES:
Free Mapmaking Tool: As mentioned earlier, the availability of the free map-making tool Map Calibrator on the GPS Tuner website really helps to get users started.
This program is PC based, and installs easily and quickly. It allows the user to easily calibrate maps on the Host PC, or download pre-calibrated maps from Expedia. You can also manage Waypoints through this PC application.
Also of great value is the ability to slice one large map into many smaller maps based on user definable sizes. This works well in reducing the memory footprint of the program, which of course allows it to work faster and more efficiently on the PDA (even on older PDA’s like my iPAQ h5555).
GEO License: Also available for purchase (at a slightly higher license cost) is a GEO License, which allows a user to walk the outer boundary of a building, home, or property, and calculate the area of the finished polygon.
In the picture to the left, you can see the area that I calculated just walking around a building in my area. This isn’t precise, but that’s because I didn’t feel like walking into the flower bed and up to each corner of the building, following it’s perimeter (a real good way to gain unwanted attention by law enforcement too!). The particular route I followed was the cement borders for the flower garden surrounding the building, and I’m here to attest to the fact that it was exceedingly precise for the particular route that I walked. Should you need to walk the perimeter of a building and expect accurate measurements, you’ll need to get right-up close to the building wall, and walk it’s entire perimeter. Property lines are much easier to walk, and I have used my license to successfully walk my property boundary. It came up with a total that was exactly what my defined acreage was, except this went to the 3rd decimal place, whereas the surveyor info I have for my property only went to the 2nd decimal place.
SOME ISSUES TO CONSIDER:
The only two downsides to this program are two-fold: the first is that the program does not include a bundled set of maps for your use, so the user has at least some work ahead of them after they are done installing the program. Secondly, as mentioned above, because GPS Tuner uses “raster” pictures for maps instead of “vector-based” object based mapping, the more you Zoom in on a map (past the picture’s maximum zoom), the more the picture will pixelate, becoming increasingly more “blocky” with each factor of Zoom. If you create or obtain hi-resolution map pictures, then this issue will not be so bad.
Some aspects of this are obvious: on vector-based mapping, at maximum zoom (out), back-street names and POIs are omitted; only major street names or freeway IDs appear. Back-street names and POIs only become apparent when you zoom in close enough. With Raster based maps, the street names are always there, potentially cluttering-up your map’s view when you are fully zoomed-out.
CONCLUSION:
I began using this product a couple of years ago when it was still on version 4.2. It has done a wonderful job of illuminating the way for me in the past, and I plan on continuing using it for a long time to come.
It is tightly coded, so that its compact code runs smoothly and efficiently on my older iPAQ h5555 processor, and it is not a ponderous and laborious application to install (I keep a CAB version of the installer on my SD card for emergency installation). It has helped me to better understand GPS and it’s underlying structure a great deal, and has increased my interest in spending time outdoors walking and hiking.
It is a feature rich application, with frequent updates by the Developer. The Developer has committed to all point update/revisions for free (e.g. v5.1 to v5.2), and major version upgrades (v5.1 to v6.0) are free with the purchase of a one year Standard license. License are available without Free Version Upgrades, and there is also a special license available for those users (engineers or surveyors) who want to calculate an “area” of something (property, a house, etc) by walking around it’s outer limits with GPS active.
Pros
Frequent Program Updates (Revisions) are free. - Version Upgrades are free for 1 year.
- Multilingual (currently supports 24 different languages via Unicode/UTF8: your PDA must support your desired language natively in order for the UTF8 encoding to work).
- GPS Share, a unique online program for sharing your current GPS position with fellow GPS Tuner users.
- Quick and efficient framework, makes good use of slower processors and has a small memory footprint.
- Free Mapmaker & Calibration utility available on the website.
- Lots of Geocaching-friendly options.
- Reasonably priced!
Cons
- Maps are Raster-based picture/Graphics, not vector-based object maps.
- User must create her/his own maps.
- Could benefit from a larger selection of Geocaching features.
THE INFO:
Author Company: Megalith Systems
Current Version: v5.0 revision “K”.
Company Website: www.gpstuner.com
URL for Product: http://www.gpstuner.com/index.html
Cost: $34 for Standard (1Year Free Upgrades),
$24 for Basic (no Upgrades), and
$48 for GEO (Area calculation plus 1Year Free Upgrades).
Rating: 4.7 out of 5.
UPDATE
Discount for MobilitySite members: Megalith Systems has generously agreed to provide the first 500 customers to buy either the STANDARD or GEO license (before January 31st of 2007) a 20% discount on their purchase. Purchases must be made directly thru the GPSTuner website in order for the discount code GPST-MOB-070131 to work.
Written by Jack Cook · Filed Under GPS, Mobilitysite Reviews
Tagged:
Did you like this post?
Share your vote!
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Leave a Reply