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I'm getting ready to bite the bullet and order a keychain style GPS. How well do they actually perform? I have a Dodge pickup and a motorcycle. Will they perform well still attached to the keychain or do they need to be removed and placed horizontally?
Sorry if my question is newbish. I've used GPS for years but never a bluetooth one hooked to a keychain!
I have successfully used mine in my house with 3 layers of shingle roofing. A metal roof in a pickup might impair signals but there should be enough glass. Motorcycle should be no problem. It does not appear to care about its own orientation - I've the Freedom 2000. Is very good and sensitive and picks up pretty fast.
I love my Freedom 2000. I think it gets much better reception than my hand held Magellan.
The only downsides are the fact that it is Bluetooth. That means, any time you want to use it, you will need to wait for it to connect, then look for signal. The GPS will conserve battery by going inactive when it has not been used for a short period of time. But that is nothing agains the keychain, it is likely to be an issue with any bluetooth GPS.
But if you are needing to go with a bluetooth GPS I highly recommend the Freedom 2000. You can leave it dangling on your keychain and it will not be a problem.
hmm This is the first time I have seen one of these. It looks pretty cool, do you just use a laptop or something else to read the data and have the mapping software on the laptop?
I hever never used it with my laptop, I am not sure how to set that up. I use it as a bluetooth GPS for my blackberry. You pair the gps with the phone using "set up bluetooth" icon on the bb. Then you need to select it as the gps Data Source in the "options" icon under advanced options/GPS.
Then the GPS is available to use in any gps enabled application on the bb, i.e. bb maps, google mobile maps, etc.
They're typically used with handheld devices, like BlackBerries. However, I have successfully used my Freedom Keychain 2000 with my laptop and DeLorme Street Atlas 2009. I have to run a hyperterminal script to map the bluetooth output to a COM: port for DeLorme, but once I do that, it works fine. The puck has no software with it, it just provides NMEA sentences to a GPS app running on something else.
You can inhibit this power down effect if you run BBMaps in the background while you run Google Maps in the foreground. Google Maps lacks the ability to start or acknowledge the external GPS. BBMaps provides that signal and keeps the puck from timing out.