It was a mid Summer early afternoon - 07.07.07 to be precise - that I was out in the Silver Mountains area searching for a much sought after (by myself) Sturgeon Falls/Gorge. The parking area and trail head were very well marked but the trail itself disappeared after about 300 feet into the woods. Fortunately, I found some broken tree branches and bent plants (signs of human activity) and managed to get to a (not very useful) sign. It only said which way one should go but didn’t say how far one should go! Although the trail was quite wide (an old logging road), but plant growth was in abundance hinting dearth of human activity in this area. After walking for nearly a mile and not knowing how far I had to go (I wasn’t hearing any water sound either), I decided to return back to the parking area. It was then that my proud mapping/hiking skills left me high and dry - leaving me lost for about (what seemed like the longest) 30 minutes (of my life) before eventually finding the trail. But for my Swiss Army Knife, I probably would have been part of Upper Michigan’s wilderness forever!!

Not that I didn’t want to trust my memory and/or hiking/mapping skills, but the aforementioned experience coupled with neophelia and a long time habit of recording (in detail) geography led me to buy my first hand held GPS unit. Magellan eXplorist 210 North America seemed pretty sufficient at the time of purchase: It did its part in helping me get coordinates of many a wonderful places in this beautiful neck of the woods. However, lack of detailed maps, only 22MB of available memory and no facility to add more storage soon started becoming problematic features

Needless to say, neophelia struck again around Christmas of 2007 and after a bit of (re)search, I decided to go with Garmin GPSMap 60CSx. Customizable storage (accepts microSD cards); smart display (distinguishes day from night); decent navigation instructions even with basemap; 12 channel SiRFstar III high-sensitivity GPS receiver (WAAS-enabled) continuously tracks and uses up to 12 satellites to compute and update the position; built-in quad helix receiving antenna, with external antenna connection (MCX); data transfer (to/from a computer) via standard USB cables; approximately 18 hours of battery life … I am totally hooked to this thing. In order to miniaturize the chances of me printing driving directions in future, I added a 2GB microSD card and all of 1066 maps (covering almost all of North America) from MapSource MetroGuide v8.

One thing that totally pissed me off about MapSource was that it’s a MS Windows only application. As much as I would have loved to see no trace of Microsoft products on my computer, this (and couple other things) have forced me to put an instance of Windows under Parallels on my Apple MacBook Pro

Left: GPS, Manual, MapSource MetroGuide and 9-pin Cable
Right: Close up of Downtown Houghton

As it can be seen from the above snapshots, with the addition of MapSource Metroguide maps, the information displayed is pretty exhaustive - even our very own downtown Houghton has vivid details (yes, we do have a downtown and yes, the downtown does have business establishments) although Michigan Technological University (my school) is still listed as Michigan College of Mining & Technology (a name whose last official usage was in 1964), College Avenue still goes right through the Michigan Tech Campus (College Ave & US41 are the same for a while) and some streets/roads are missing.

Added bonus is that there are couple ways in which I can use this GPS unit with my Nikon D200 [currently, I add POI (Points of Interest) in my GPS, then add them manually to the image description - as can be seen from many pictures in my showcase]:

1. With Nikon MC-35 GPS Adapter Cord (this thing costs about $100 and I have absolutely no idea why) and the 9-pin cable from Garmin, camera can record GPS coordinates into the EXIF data in pictures.
2. Almost every GPS unit saves track log - a table containing GPS coordinates recorded at regular intervals of time. Once these track logs are imported to the computer, one can use GPSPhotoLinker (on Apple OS X) to add the GPS information to EXIF data.

I am looking forward to using this unit with my subsequent expeditions - photography related and/or otherwise. If you happen to know some tricks, tips, suggestions that would help me optimize the usage, please post them as comments: I will greatly appreciate them