Hav­ing used the Roy­al­Tek RGM-3800 for a week now I am very pleased with tramore.jpg it. The biggest test to date came yes­ter­day when I grabbed a couple new AAA bat­ter­ies for it and made the fix at the apart­ment. I popped it in my suit jacket and headed off on a road trip down coun­try with my friend Mary. The little unit kept a fix all the way south, whether in the car, inside build­ings, in the train and the bat­ter­ies las­ted an even 10 hours (per­fectly timed for me re-entering the apartment.

I wish the unit could sync with OSX rather than hav­ing to use Par­al­lels to use the sup­plied data sync software.

It works well mind, trans­fer­ring the NMEA data­files flaw­lessly. The sup­plied iLocat scans your down­load folder and presents them for match­ing with pho­tos. It also has a quick map fea­ture, so that you can verify that the path you down­loaded resembles the one that you thought you took. This is a great way to determ­ine whether the unit was func­tional. The only feed­back from the unit itself is a little LED that goes red when you are low on power. In off when the unit is off, blinks green when acquir­ing a fix and goes solid green when all is well. Thus you end up leav­ing a lot to trust.

So far the little unit lives up to this trust. Typ­ic­ally, when I have the NMEA file, I put it through GPS­Ba­bel under OSX, trans­late it into a GPX file and then view it as a path in Google Earth. The sample below is from our trip south.

The only prob­lem I have run into thus far is an inab­il­ity to erase the flash memory. I haven’t reached capa­city yet (far from it actu­ally) and right now I have con­figured it to start over­writ­ing the pre­vi­ously stores way­po­ints. this may be fine. How­ever, if you hold down the power but­ton for three seconds, the little LED is sup­posed to altern­ate between red and green and erase the flash. I can’t seem to trig­ger this and although the Roy­al­Tek sup­port folks sug­gest you can erase it from the data­log­ger applic­a­tion, I have not been able to do so.

Non­ethe­less, a week in and hav­ing made five or six good jour­neys, the little unit con­tin­ues to impress, on bike, in car or train or wan­der­ing of foot. Quite cool!

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