Finding Your Way

Living on a small Island like Hong Kong, you would hardly think there’s much need for satellite-aided navigation. There isn’t, unless you take to the sea. All the same, one of the latest gadgets to hit Hong Kong’s electronics stores is the Global Positioning System.

The ability to use satellite signals as way of fixing position and heading has been around for decades, but it has only recent been available in an affordable and small hand-held form. Marriage to CD-ROM of Web-driven map service, the machines, with their liquid-crystal screens, become instant moving maps. And they work. Should the gadget-fat conscious rush out and buy one?

Car testing the GPS III Plus, manufactured by U.S. based Garmin and retailing for about $500, I was amazed to see the little black machine give me reading on direction, speed and altitude. The lightweight navigator with its stubby antenna takes a will to locate the satellites, but once triangulated gives you, at its most basic setting, a compass-like heading. The speed reading is also accurate, when compared to the speedometer, though altitude fluctuates wildly for some reason.

Now comes the biggest challenges with these machines, which is to marry their accurate location abilities to known waypoints on the landscape. This is done using set of maps that is fed in to the machine from a laptop computer using a cable link, provided with the gadget. Just insert the CD-ROM containing the maps, select your general region and hey presto, the next time you turn the gizmo on, it tell you exactly where you’re standing on a map of the area. So much for the sales pitch. In reality, the kind of detail you’d need to make a really useful street navigator isn’t yet available for much of Asia. Upstate New York, yes; Hong Kong or Jakarta; no. That may be one reason why Hong Kong electronics retailers report that most purchasers are North Americans planning to use the units at home.

To be sure, there is map source for Hong Kong, but the available scale does not give you a street level guide, only a truly unhelpful location in relation to nautical of aviation waypoints. Using the company-supplied CD-ROM I also located maps for much of South Asia, but again the level of detail was so minimal, I was better off using maps as the back of my desk diary.

Doubtless the day will soon came when I will have one of these machines built in to my PDA of my watch. But I’m not rushing out to spend $500 on hand-held navigational aid-unless I’m sailor of flier. An certainly not for getting around Hong Kong.

(By Michael Vatikiotis, in www.feer.com Jan 25 2001, page 43)

Re-publish by. www.tradinginfoceo.blogspot.com , March 3, 2008