Frabjous Times

Here's the first of two entries about some technology purchases I've made recently. This one was occasioned by some idle thoughts I had about our upcoming ocean cruise and the instruments which were used for celestial navigation (quadrants, sextants, and octants for latitude, chronometers for longitude). I didn't pick up any of those, but the 21st century analogue of a GPS receiver instead.

Now I have a friend who has had one of these for several years now (an early adopter), always the sort with an on-screen roadmap and all sorts of fancy features. What I wanted didn't involve all these extras but just something which displayed coordinates, bearing, and distance. I would just like to be able to go up on deck on our cruise and see how many nautical miles and how many hours it would be to our destination, and to be able to stroll around once in port and be able to find my way back to the ship somehow.

After some hunting around, and a brief episode where I bought a fuller-featured receiver than this but discovered it DOA once I got it home, I found something that just about fits the bill. I've already saved the location of my home (see the META lines in the source of this page for what it gives), of work, and of our vacation destination, of which more information will be forthcoming later. Coming in at well under $100 US, it seems like a steal to me.