For all you that are asking me what GPS to buy, we used a Garmin Emap for both books and OziExplorer Software to interface our GPS data with Vicmap Government Maps bought from the Melbourne Map Centre in Chadstone.
The Emap was perfect for the job with
exception
of the built in antenna which does not work very well if you want to carry the unit in a back pack as we did. This was remedied by fitting an external antenna to the unit and attaching it to my helmet which worked very well.
The only other area that it was lacking was that it only had a 2048 point memory. As you travel along a GPS units constantly picks up signals from satellites that it has locked onto. From the information gathered from these satellites it calculates position, height etc. Each time it has to record a bit of information this is called a "Track Point". The straighter and flatter the line you travel, the less points you use, the more windy and undulating your course, the more points you use. As you can imagine, enduro riding uses a lot of points. We found that the Emap was good for about 80km - 90km before it started to run out of memory. For us this was not a problem because we would simply download our data back at camp when we re-fuelled. But for those of you that want to carry extra fuel and take on massive 200km rides, I would recommend a GPS unit with a larger memory. There are portable units with up to 10,000 track points available. Check out www.garmin.com
OziExplorer is the software we used to help us build our maps and it's
fantastic
for viewing maps, planning routes, loops etc and interfacing with your GPS unit. If you want to know more about OziExplorer trial versions are available at www.oziexplorer.com.
Click on the image below to download the Zip file that contains all of our recommended loops for GPS. These files were created using OziExplorer software and are only able to be uploaded into a GPS unit after they have FIRST been loaded from this Zip file into OziExplorer.
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