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Has anyone mounted their laptop on the vehicle and used a GPS Mouse Receiver (USB) BU-353S4 like this?
BU-353-USB-GPS-Receiver-SiRF-Star-III-4-Laptop-Notebook
I can get my 1:50,000 and 1:100,00 maps on the GPS unit and my laptop but the GPS screen is small.
It just seemed to make sense to just run the laptop with Ozi and use the USB GPS mouse.
Yep, did that for a number of years (well mounted on the Mrs lap) using a Garman mushroom, but have since gone to using IGO 8 on my 7" double din unit for street bt street GPSing and Ozi Android on my 10" tablet for "bush" mapping.
To be honest, the Tablet is best for bush touring, easily mounted. I still take the Netbook along to store photos and do the odd bit of web work when Wifi is available.
I used to run a 11.6" Asus notebook with Ozi Explorer and hema maps loaded and a USB gps dongle. Can't remember the brand of the dongle but it worked fine. Powering and mounting the laptop was an issue. Now I'm trying a 10" Samsung Tab running Hema explorer.
Use to but now use ipad.........
For quite a few years I ran a laptop with Ozi Explorer and all the relevant 50K and 100K topo's, but that was all for work. We had no magic mounting for it, just the Nav's lap, and ran an Inverter to power it, which always got really hot and shut itself off…
Now - iPad Mini off a Ram suction mount from the windscreen. It doesn't have a fraction of the features that Ozi has, but I find I don't need all those features now anyway. I still take a map tube with paper 100K maps as a backup, but generally the Hema 4WD maps, or the new Explore Oz 200K map does me just fine.
As a side benefit, all my tunes play through the stereo from the iPad, and I have it mounted so that it will take 'dash-cam' video as we are driving. Something we seem to be using more and more.
yes i also run an ipad but with hema maps which i think leaves a bit to be desired, i would like to run ozi and probably will when they come out for the ipad.
gee a lot of ppl get lost easy eh
i never get lost 3D i just find new tracks lol.
3D not worried about getting lost. Always carry maps, paper, and compass. I will get a sextant one day just to check on the compass. :biggrin:
Its more about on land/road navigation.
As for the android tablets it seems hard to distinguish which has built in GPS and works with Ozi
I reckon I was nearly lost once (or maybe we should call it 'bush-whacked'), when simply crossing a ridge and coming back, with no tracks, in the cloud and rain and cold, so visual clues were scarce. And yes, this was Far North Qld! A total round trip of around 7klms I reckon. I ended up completely doubting myself and my read on the map. I even had a bloody topo print out, a GPS, and a compass and had checked it about 1500 times and then decided it was wrong!! The problem was that my topo didn't have all the longitude markings on the bit I had printed, and I made a massive assumption that was wrong by a UTM grid section!!! One little grid on a topo is a whole lot of turf on the ground. Particularly when it is cold and wet and, and cold, and…. well, you are lost!!!
I ended up getting home safely by trusting my GPS, and going straight line! Anything less than about 6" diameter got run over…. To say how lost I was at the time was hard to define, but I had already decided in my mind that even the GPS didn't match the topo map, and that I thought I knew where I was according to the terrain on the topo. How wrong I was. I had to fight my mind to trust the bloody GPS and follow it. When sitting around the fire that night discussing it with a mate who was a pilot, he likened it to being in the clouds with no vision and having to trust in the instruments.
Weird...