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These GPS receivers a self-contained GPS instruments complete with displays, maps that you can download from your computer or the internet, and other features that are designed to help you when you
are out sailing, or camping, or driving, or whatever. They tend to be much more expensive than the other GPS types discussed on this site.
We require three features for our application, an external antenna, a serial port to connect to the laptop or PDA, and an output format using NMEA sentences output every second. It can be tough to
find a reasonably priced handheld GPS receiver that has all three of these features.
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 Magellan Meridian Gold: This model works pretty well. It is listed here because we have one of these
and have tested it with GPS2LT. It has all three features we like to see in a receiver. It is a little awkward to use in a car. You have the external antenna connected to the receiver and the serial cable from the
receiver to the laptop or PDA, but it’s not too bad.
We have had some problems with this model working reliably with GPS2PDA running on older Palm PDAs. The GPS receiver transmits too much data each second for the older PDAs to process. If you have
a newer Palm PDA (Tungsten Tx or Zire 71) or a Pocket PC PDA then you should be ok. These PDAs are much faster and can keep up with the receiver output.
Here is a link to the Magellan site for this model.
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 Garmin 76: This is an example of a model that isn’t appropriate for GPS2PDA. It does have an external
antenna and it does have a serial port, but it outputs NMEA sentences every two seconds instead of every second. This isn’t good enough to do accurate travel time studies.
It has a special output mode (a proprietary text format) that does output data every second. We have modified GPS2LT to support this mode, but haven’t done the same for GPS2PDA.
Here is a link to the Garmin site for this model.
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 Trimble GPS Pathfinder Pocket: Trimble is the Mercedes of the GPS market
. They make the best and the most expensive GPS receivers in the world. Frankly, most of their products are a gross overkill if you just want to collect
travel time data. You may have one of these units in your office, however, so it would make sense to use it if you could. In general, this is no problem. You
have to configure the receiver so that it outputs the type of data GPS2PDA and GPS2LT uses, but that is the only trick to using a Trimble receiver. Check your
manual carefully. You have to run some Trimble software to set the parameters of the receiver. You want NMEA data format, output every second. Here is a link to the GPS Pathfinder Controller download page on the Trimble site. This is
the software you use to configure the Pathfinder Pocket.
You also want to use an external antenna on the roof of your car.
Here is a link to the Trimble site for information about this receiver.
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Return to GPS Receivers page
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