One of the first thing that I did when I arrived in the US was to buy a GPS unit. I did it because I found it kind of intimidating to drive on the highways in the US without having some sort of guidance. It may sound stupid, but if you miss an exit you usually have a couple of miles to go until you reach the next one. Figuring out how to continue from the next exit or taking the highway in the opposite direction to reach original exit is not a fun experience. After I got lost a couple of times (and lost a good chuck of time in the process too) trying to figure out where I was (no, I don’t ask for directions :) ) the GPS seemed like the logical thing.
Not really being a fan of spending big buck (I might have been Scottish in a previous life if this reincarnation crap is true), I’ve looked for the most basic unit that I could find and could successfully fulfill my needs.
I ended up buying a Tom Tom One 3rd edition. It was overall a good decision and I was very happy with the prince: 120$ (not the outrageous 184$ that Amazon wants for it right now). I started using it and almost never got lost again :)
Now, having the unit, the natural question (after I started going hiking) was: how can I record and later plot a path that I walk on? The unit does know exactly where I am (with a certain error of course) and should be able to do that. Well, it turns out it cannot do that with out-of-the box software installed on it. Turns out some wise-guys decided to add this capability (among other cool ones) to Tom Tom based devices. The extra software that they build and you need to put on your device is called Tripmaster. You can read about it and download it here: http://www.webazar.org/tomtom/tripmaster.php?lang=uk
Now that I had the GPS unit and the path recording software I decided to take it for a ride. Everything went perfect until about 1 hour into the test. At that moment the internal battery of the GPS unit got depleted. The recording stopped. Now I don’t know what kind of hikes people usually do, but my hikes take anywhere from 2 hours to 6-7 hours. So this solution wasn’t going to work.
I though about building an USB charger: http://theromaniandream.com/blog/2009/06/28/the-usb-charger-project. In the end I ended up buying it (call me lazy). You can see it here: http://www.amazon.com/Tekkeon-TekCharge-Mobile-Battery-Charger/dp/B0014KLX9C/ The unit runs with either 2 or 4 AA batteries and acts as an USB charger for the GPS unit.
So right now, with added autonomy, my 3 part cheap GPS path recording solution was ready. You can see the first recorded path in the map section of my latest hike: http://theromaniandream.com/blog/2010/06/20/hiking-bridal-veil-fallslake-serene-trail/