Reviews > Navigation and Map Gear > GPS > Delorme Earthmate GPS LT-20 > Brian Tannehill > Initial Report

Backpacking Background:

I am fairly new to backpacking, but I have hunted/fished/camped all my life in East Texas, Colorado, and California. My young kids (4, 10, 12) limit me to weekend overnight camping trips, or day hikes Geocaching. I am also an avid mountain biker. For now I live in the Central Coast area of California (Lompoc, Santa Maria area), and am surrounded by many different areas from beaches to mountain regions ranging up to 5,000 feet (1,500 m), with the temperatures averaging about 60 F (16 C) degrees year round.

Product Information:

Manufacturer: Delorme
Year of Manufacture: 2005
URL: http://www.delorme.com
Software: Delorme Street Atlas USA 2005
MSRP: $99.00 US
Weight: 2 5/8 oz (76 g)
Length of Cable: 5 feet (1.5 m)
Size of Unit: 2 5/8 in (6.6 cm) long x 1 7/8 in (4.8 cm) wide x 9/16 in (1.5 cm) thick

Minimum System Requirements:

The system requirements for the Earthmate GPS is a USB port on my laptop.
The system requirements for Street Atlas 2005 are:
Microsoft® Windows® 2000 (Service Pack 3 and higher): 64 MB RAM (256 MB recommended)
Microsoft Windows XP: 128 MB RAM (256 MB recommended)
Intel® Pentium 300 MHz or higher processor (600 MHZ recommended)
700 MB of available hard-disk space
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 or later
32x CD Drive
Microsoft Windows 98/ME is not supported with this release

My System:

I am using a Dell Inspiron Model 5100 laptop with a Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz, and 256MB of Ram running Windows XP Home.

Field Locations:

The locations of my tests will range from the Los Padres National Forest just east of here ranging up to 5000 feet (1500 m) in elevation to the locally famous Pismo Beach. Other areas I will be driving include Santa Maria, Lompoc and monthly trips down to Agoura Hills just north of Los Angeles. Basically anywhere I drive on the central coast of California.

My initial thoughts and description:

The packaged unit comes with the Earthmate LT-20 GPS and the Delorme Street Atlas USA 2005. Delorme was nice enough to send a copy of Topo USA 5.0 along with since the GPS will run on that software as well. I will not be reviewing the topo program since I have already done that here.

Ah installation time. I have just recently formatted my laptop so installation took about 15 minutes for both CD's. When I first run the program, it prompts me to re-organize the button tabs across the bottom of the screen. Having never used the software I found it odd they would want me to re-organize them with out knowing how best to re order or what order would work best for me.

Delorme Street Atlas USA 2005 looks just like the Topo 5.0 program. It is laid out the same way and functions basically the same way. I couldn't possibly cover every detail about this software program in this report so I will focus on the ones I like.

I am also the proud owner of one of the earlier version called the Tripmate. Not only is the Tripmate bigger, it is powered by 4 AA batteries. The newer Earthmate is powered by the USB port on the laptop. One of my concerns with the Earthmate being powered by the laptop is that of power consumption. My laptop is about two years old so the battery doesn't last between maybe hour and a half to two hours depending on what its doing. Will the new Earthmate drain my battery faster?

Here is a list of basically what you can do on this Topo software:

Find
Print
Draw
GPS
Route
Info
3-D
Netlink
Voice
Map Display
Handheld Export

Here are how the tabs are organized across the bottom of the screen.

© 2004 DeLorme (www.delorme.com) Street Atlas 2005®

The features I like the most so far are the GPS, Route, and Voice.

GPS:

As I noted in my Topo USA 5.0 report the software showed my house in the same position as noted on the picture. The green dot on the map is me sitting in my driveway with the Eartmate locked up on satellites right before we left. The yellow box is the find feature showing where it thinks my house is.

The GPS portion is just cool. I'm not sure why but I played with the software/GPS the first night for around 3 hours and could not get more than 3 satellites to lock on. I used my Magellan Meridian GPS to see what satellites I should be viewing or locking on to. I had no problems getting my Magellan locked up. I even drove around my neighborhood with 3 satellites locked and still got nothing to show up on the software.

I tried it again the next night after work and in about 15 minutes it locked up on some satellites. One of the reasons I think it took so long on initial set up is it had to download an updated almanac which takes around 12 minutes on a good day. The almanac is not stored in the unit so it has to guess daily on where it last saw satellites. I know there was some severe space weather going on at the time. Had I not been testing this unit, I would have taken it back after using it for three hours and not getting anything.

Day 3 of use and I figured out I had to reformat my laptop. So with this in mind, I reformatted correctly, reinstalled the software and went for a test drive. Within about 3-4 minutes I had a great satellite lock. I then proceeded to drive around where I live and down to the beach. Everything works great. The only thing I can say is due to the combination of the laptop not being formatted correctly, the severe space weather and Mr Murphy being along for the ride is why nothing worked the first day.

I'll explain the rest of the GPS stuff in my Field Report, it is just too much for here.

Route:

The route function is way cool. Especially with the turn by turn in Microsoft Mary's computer voice. I'm really surprised because on the Delorme website they have some examples of the voices and they sound horrible. The voices were not that bad on my laptop. I used the route function coming back from the beach today about 5 miles away from my house. The route took me over a road that is closed so I am still disappointed with that feature. It has done this two times so far. One road I know has been closed for 5-6 years probably closer to 8 years.

One of the coolest features about the route feature is it re-routed me automatically when I got off course. This is very cool. I did however get it confused a few times in making numerous turns.

The route function shows me and tells me the next upcoming turn, how fast it is approaching and how far away it is. It says "next turn is coming up in 28 seconds and is two tenths of a mile away". I'm not exactly sure how the GPS determines the time until the next turn. Is it the programmed speeds for each road or is it the actual speed from the GPS? One turn that was after a long straight away was accurate within about 2 secs. Other turns were way off though. One time the GPS told me I was 19 Seconds away when I was really only about 5 secs. Also as I get closer to my house there are a series of really quick left right left turns. Basically each turn is within a few hundred feet of the next. The route function didn't really keep up with me and at one point I was two turns ahead of it before it caught up.

Another cool feature of the route tab is called Plan Trip. Here I can estimate end of day breaks and fuel stops. It also gives me an estimated fuel cost. In this time of gas prices running $2.97 US per gallon that's handy to have. My wife likes to make a lot of trips down to Wal-Mart which is about 10 miles (16 km) in the next town. So I calculate the amount each trip cost one way. I think it is a very useful tool for planning road trips.

Voice:

There is an extensive voice set up and recognition process involved with this program. Not having used any voice recognition software before I thought this was the coolest thing. Not only does the computer talk to me, I can talk to it and tell it what to do for hands off operation. I had to talk to the computer for about five minutes for it to recognize all my inflections in my voice. Of course sentences were provided to read so I wasn't just making stuff up.

Some of the things I can say to the computer are "what is the next turn?", "show next turn", "center on next turn", "directions", "where am I", "coordinates", "shush", "pan left", right, up and down, zoom in and out and my personal favorite "are we there yet"? When asked that it tells me how much time is left and how far away my destination is.

More Initial Thoughts
Some of the other features I have used some but I will discuss more in the field report.

Find
I still have trouble finding locations. At one point I had found my house and created a route. I then deleted the route and tried to make another route but the software could not find my house. I know where my house was but the software could not seem to find it on several occasions.

Map Files
I do not get many options on this but one thing I can do is import waypoints from the Delorme Topo USA 5.0 software. After they are imported though there is no way to not display them like on the topo program.

Draw
Once again Delorme allows me to draw my own roads and make modifications to the map. They also allow me to route from user defined areas as well. I've discussed that though in my topo reviews.

Map Display
I can display the map in imperial or metric units, but I can only use Lat and long for coordinates.

Handheld Export
I can export my maps to a handheld device such as a palm pilot but I must have software installed on the handheld that can read the maps.

Some of my questions and concerns:

I really don't have any major concerns now at this point. Satellites are locking on very quickly after initialization, and the software is pretty accurate.

Some other questions to answer through the rest of this test.

The Earthmate is powered from the Laptop's USB port. How will the USB Earthmate affect power usage on the laptop?
Once I become familiar with the software, will the find function become easier to use?
Will the software show position with only three or four satellites locked?

Test Plan:

I will be testing this software all over the central coast of California to the Los Padres National Forest both east and north of me, and maybe even out to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I will use the software to find points of interest in and around the local cities, especially while Geocaching. I will also use it to find my way to trailheads that I hike.

This software and GPS offers features and functions previously only available in high end GPS units. I'm really excited to be testing this product.

Thanks to BGT and Delorme for allowing me to participate in this test.

Brian

Amendment

Initially the LT-20 shipped with the Street Atlas 2005 software. That has been corrected and I have received the 2006 software. While virtually the same there are two big differences. One is the map files and two is how soon the software will announce a turn. In the 2005 version there was no way to select which map files you could view without loading them on the program. The 2006 version fixes this and list the open files and lets you select each to be displayed. The next issue is how soon the voice prompt announces the next turn. The 2006 version lets you select how far out it will warn you of the impending turn. The default is 30 seconds. I like this feature because previously, once you made a turn, it would immediately tell you the next turn, and not tell you again. So if you had a few minutes between turns then you might forget. The new version will warn you again in any number of seconds you input till your next turn. So when I am 30 seconds from my next turn it will prompt me, "turn right in 30 seconds"

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Reviews > Navigation and Map Gear > GPS > Delorme Earthmate GPS LT-20 > Brian Tannehill > Initial Report