Car sat nav also suitable for sailing / hillwalking?

[windandwave]

Rather than buy two gps devices I'd like to get one that could do double duty - road navigation and also for sailing / hillwalking. Are there any units that might do the job?

[Tripps]

windandwave said:

Rather than buy two gps devices I'd like to get one that could do double duty - road navigation and also for sailing / hillwalking. Are there any units that might do the job?

They are all quite different I'm afraid and have different requirements, car navigation has to have details of roads, directions, junctions and speeds; nautical kit needs to know depths, buoy locations and shipping lanes as well as integrating with radar and depth sensors; while walking kit knows about altitudes, waypoints and often provide pedometer and heart-rate functions. I've never come across anything to merge two of these properly, never mind all three.

You may be able to use a car device to tell you where you are when trekking, but I don't think you'd get the fine detail, equally my satnav know when I'm over (or under) water, but that's about it - it wouldn't sound a collision alarm for instance.

Garmin sell some great nautical gear and I beleive they do trekking stuff too, some from pretty low prices too - so are worth checking out.

[neilmac]

windandwave said:

Rather than buy two gps devices I'd like to get one that could do double duty - road navigation and also for sailing / hillwalking. Are there any units that might do the job?

This might be worth a look if you use a PDA for your satnav.

www.memory-map.co.uk/maptech_marine_pocket_pc_accessories.htm

Neil

[windandwave]

Tripps said:

They are all quite different I'm afraid and have different requirements, car navigation has to have details of roads, directions, junctions and speeds; nautical kit needs to know depths, buoy locations and shipping lanes as well as integrating with radar and depth sensors; while walking kit knows about altitudes, waypoints and often provide pedometer and heart-rate functions. I've never come across anything to merge two of these properly, never mind all three.

Good points all. I don't really need a jack of all trades though - for sailing I'd be happy with one that could simply output lat/long which I could then use for paper plotting, and for hillwalking I'd be happy if I could put in summits, waypoints and various other bits & pieces as points of interest, and maybe output a trail to pc of where I'd been.

I like Neil's Pocket PC solution - that might be the most practical option (although people on this forum seem to think that PDA satnav is a very fiddly option?).

[.Adam.]

I think a Garmin Quest would do the job. Long battery life, fully waterproof, and I think it can take marine charts as well.