On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 13:27:31 GMT, "Mike Z."
wrote:

Like a lot of folks here, I debated between the Garmin 295, 196 and the Anywhere Map from Control Vision. I badly wanted a color
unit but couldn't see buying the 295 because it has to be due for replacement. Witness the nice, non battery eating screens of the
new Street Pilot and the 76C handhelds.

Well, with a little trip coming up, I couldn't wait for the new units to trickle down so I ordered the Anywhere Map. Pretty cool for
$1350 with a cordless and a couple goodies. But then I immediately set about trying to figure out how to keep the thing charged on
an extended trip without getting the cigar lighter reconnected. Double drat, this is dumb, so I cancelled that order and sent for a
196 from Aircraft Spruce.

It is still cold here so I was playing with the thing in the house and didn't expect it to work inside. Finally after attempting to
use the unit in the car, I became suspicious when I did 6 touch and goes and in spite of pretty good initial readings, it only
recorded 2 flights 1/10hr out of the 6. So I started comparing the performance to my 6 year old GPS II+.

As it turns out, the 196 works pretty darn good with the remote antenna. Almost but not quite as good as the 6 year old II+.

As it also turns out, I can get the sats better with binocs than it does with the stick antenna. Example: this morning, I tried both
units one in each hand this morning, the old handheld had a 3D lock and 6 birds almost full scale in 45 seconds. The 196 had only
2 -1/2 scale open bars after 3 minutes and showed no signs of acquiring more. I had to leave for work and still no lock.

Is this as good as I can expect? The Garmin guy I talked to said the stick should work as well but didn't seem to interested that it
didn't work out that way.

Incidentally, from the top of a 12 story building yesterday, it had 6 sats but took over 15 minutes before it found WAAS on one on
the stick. With the remote it had a D on all 6 in a couple minutes and almost full scale.

I find it hard to believe that Garmin's latest model (the 196) has a
substantially longer lock time than the GPS II+. Processor technology
has increased substantially so the 196 should have significantly more
horsepower to search for satellites.

I suspect that due to the newness of the 196, it did not have an
almanac downloaded. Downloading an almanac takes at least ~15
minutes, and can take several attempts if there is poor reception
during the download process.

Without an almanac, the GPS does not know which satellite PRNs to
track. Therefore it randomly searches for PRNs until it finds one -
this can take much longer to lock onto a full set of satellites from a
cold start.

A better comparison would be to leave both GPSs on for several hours,
then switch the GPSs off, then try the lock time comparison.

-Nathan