Great for the outdoors, good for driving
Pros:
Durable, dependable, attractive, practical, long battery life, easy to read backlit screen, good basemap
Cons:
clock is GPS-derived
The Bottom Line:
As my introduction to GPS technology, it was everything I hoped for and more. Forget Garmin and buy the 200, you'll love it.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
This GPS unit comes with a basemap of North American highways, major roads, towns, bodies of water and other points of interest. Its yellow, waterpoof body is very attractive and the using the buttons does not block the screen since they are below it, unlike in Garmin units. Its orange backlight is attractive and even. It's also selectable (off/low/high) and stays on constantly (or can have an optional timeout) which makes it great for night time navigating and driving. The unit displays several pages selectable with the NAV button:
1. A map. This screen displays your points of interests, bodies of water, highways and major streets. It shows where you've been and where you want to be. You can adjust the orientation so North is up, your heading is up, or where you're supposed to be going is up. For driving, I prefer the second mode.
2. A compass. This isn't a true compass but derives your direction from where you were and where you are. A true compass comes with the Explorist 300. This screen also shows where your next waypoint, North, the sun and the moon are.
3. Satellite strength display. This shows which satellites you're receiving and how strong their respective signals are.
4. A general data screen showing a resettable trip odometer, elevation, location and more.
On screens 1 and 2, you can choose 2 of the following 9 parameters to be displayed along with the other information:
Bearing
Distance
Speed
Heading
Estimated time of day upon arrival
Estimated time until arrival
Elevation
Time
Date
The unit allows you to store your own point of interests with an icon of your choice, but you can only use eight characters to label them.
The unit refreshes positions rather quickly, about twice per second.
Speed and distance measurements are very accurate.
Although it only contains a North American basemap, a wide selection of coordinate systems, languages and units make the unit usable worldwide on land or at sea.
I used this unit in my last job to deliver pizza. I was new to the area, so I used the unit to pinpoint the pizza shop and hard to find neighborhoods. Although the unit couldn't give me turn by turn directions, I always knew where everything was and how far it was. The unit does support route reversing, so I could always depend on the unit to get me from a customer's house back to the shop. Since it can give very accurate line-of-sight distances, I knew exactly when to charge my customers extra for living outside of our 3 mile free delivery radius.
The plastic casing is resistant to shock and scratches, as is the screen, although I opted to buy a Glisson neoprene case for it.
Compared to equivalent Garmin units, the Explorists have nicer screens, more sensible button placement and more features.
My only gripe about this unit is, as far as I know, there is no way to manually set the time and date. This has resulted in erratic times and dates, possibly resulting from it thinking I was in a different time zone or not having a signal.
The explorist 200 has no need or method to connect to a computer. Depending on who you are, this could be a good thing. If you are like me and don't want to update the base map or want PC connectivity, buy this unit. If you want this unit with connectivity, buy the Explorist 210.
