hand held GPS

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alan54

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I`m looking for a back up hand held GPS that will work inside my steel boat. I want one with a compass or heading direction. Do I need to be looking at a GPS with a fluxgate compass ? and will I need an external antenna for it to work inside the boat at the chart table? I was thinking about the Garman 76. Any thoughts anyone !!
alan

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all GPS will read a direction, but that direction is a course over the ground, and may bear no relationship with what you are steering. AFAIK, there are no GPS hand held or otherwise that are fluxgate compasses as well.

I would certainly recommend having a H/H GPS with an external aerial because of your boats construction. Magellan or garmin are both very good.



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Actually the Garmin 76 does carry an electronic compas beside the GPS system inside the casing. This however will give you some trouble inside a steel yacht. An alternative/remote GPS antenna can be hooked up to the unit, an external compas sensor is not possible.
The GPS itself will give you a heading as long as you have any speed. This heading can be in magnetic course or in true course, depending on the set-up of the device.

Arno

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Which compass would that be? The magnetic one otr the gps-driven one.
I'm not sure what you mean with not real-time as most electronic compass devices have a lag in displaying the actual course. I use a Garmin 126 Fixed GPS and I noticed that the update frequency on the bearing varies over time. My guess is that that's related to the quality of the sattelite signal. Sometimes is very quickly (more then once per second) and sometimes it seems pretty slow.
I fully agree that a plain 'mechanic' compass is easier to keep an eye on, you tend to notice bearing changes easier on a normal compass just because you see the compass rose starting to turn.

Arno

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Just to clarify the issue of the electronic compass, would I be right in saying that this is a new feature on the Garmin 76S and is not on the Garmin 76. The 76 only has the GPS driven version.

<hr width=100% size=1><A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.nwcc.info>North Wales Cruising Club</A>
 
a garmin 72 works ok inside our steel boat, but it does have a lot of windows & the gps needs to be more upright than if used outside.

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