[time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack

John Ackermann N8UR jra at febo.com
Sat Jan 1 13:48:23 UTC 2011


All, this has drifted way off track and should have stopped many 
messages ago.  I really hate having to jump in here but I've been 
getting well-justified private complaints.

Can we *please* try to keep things on topic???

John
----

J. Forster said the following on 01/01/2011 12:14 AM:
> HNY,
>
> I disagree. The reason a high performance GPS costs 100K or more is that
> the engineering cost is ammortized over a few hundred units.
>
> Say the thing cost $10M to develop and you make 1000, that's $10,000 NRE
> per unit.
>
> However, if you have a successful commercial unit and sell 1,000,000 the
> NRE is $10.
>
> I'd doubt any of the hand held GPS units costs even $50 in million
> quantities.
>
> Ditto with the SW.
>
> The errors I've seen are map, not position, errors.
>
> YMMV,
>
> -John
>
> ==================
>
>> Hi,
>>
>>    first, a happy and hopefully healthy New Year to all of you.
>>
>> I think, some of you are going slightly overboard, in what you expect a
>> $150 Dollar car navigator should do,
>> I also don't believe some of you   you realise what exactly it was
>> designed  to do.
>>
>> It is not a device to accurately shoot a missile trough somebodies
>> toilet window and hit a specified turd in the bowl.
>>
>> It is designed to get you relatively easy and close to a specified
>> designation. preferably when used in a motor car
>>
>> This it does perfectly well.  It may be a few meters out from an exact
>> house number, but it got you there without you having
>> to look at the map, (or worse get your spouse to read the map and
>> navigate you).
>>
>> It improves the road safety, especially at night time, when you often
>> don't see the street names and have to slow down to a crawl
>> with a lot of cars bunched up behind you.
>>
>> The mind boggles if some of you think because the GPS is not 100%
>> accurate, The Fire brigade gets either lost, or tries to extinguish the
>>    house next door to the burning one, just because the GPS is 30m out.
>>    What you're actually are saying is: The Fire brigade is full of idiots.
>>
>> To sell an item for 150 or so Bucks,  on  can not  reasonably expect it
>> to be  as perfect than another item which sells for 100 grand or more
>> and nobody
>>    except a few government institutions can afford it.
>>
>> Not every instrument is mad by Agilent for a cost which is prohibitive
>> to the normal punter.
>>
>> Just get back down to earth, a few years ago you had to learn how to
>> read a map, or follow the often useless instructions somebody else gave
>> you.
>>
>> Now for hardly any money, you get to your destination  with least amount
>> of effort and a lot saver than before.
>>
>> Regards, Horst
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> gonzo-
>>> "A GPS is a precision device.
>>>    A Navigator is a consumer device.
>>>    To confuse the two is to fail to understand either."
>>>
>>> A navigator IS a GPS. Surveying GPSs may use carrier phase tracking or
>>> whatever to get about 2mm accuracy. Just because it is optimized for
>>> navigation
>>> instead
>>>
>>> of location accuracy and gets about 3m accuracy doesn't mean that a
>>> navigator
>>> isn't a GPS.
>>>
>>>    Note that map accuracy has nothing to do with GPS receiver accuracy.
>>> Also
>>> some mapping data has built in errors or incorrect POIs to identify the
>>> data in
>>> case it is copied. For instance, one company's street mapping software I
>>> owned
>>> had, in the small town I live in, a POI that said: "***** Institute Of
>>> Technology"
>>>
>>> even though there has never been a school there and it was a actually
>>> closed gas
>>>
>>> station.
>>>
>>>                             -Arthur
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
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>
>
>
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