majick's Full Review: Lowrance iFINDER Plus Handheld GPS Receiver
The iFinder has all the features (and more) for half the price, but is missing one which drives me nuts! I had been wanting to get into http://www.geocaching.com/ for quite some time, but decent GPS receivers with lots of memory, on board roadmaps, and WAAS go for hundreds of dollars. Enter the iFinder.
Lowrance Who?
It seems like nobody has ever heard of Lowrance. That's no surprise, since until the release of the iFinder they sold pretty much nothing for terrestrial consumer use. Most of their products are big and expensive, for installation in boats and aircraft. They've broken into a corner of the consumer market with the iFinder, and for the most part they've done a terrific job.
Advantages
The iFinder, going for somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 at the time of writing, has all the features of the Garmin and Magellan handhelds: Zoomable roadmaps, a huge searchable "point of interest" database of business, parks, monuments, landmarks, and everything else you can think of, trail tracking, a serial connection to use with GPS-capable PC software, and nearly bottomless storage.
Storage is a big deal. Maps, especially of urban areas, are a LOT of data. A moderate detail map of the San Francisco area has hundreds of thousands of datapoints -- mine takes up almost 14 megabytes! Fortunately, Lowrance made an ingenious design decision with the iFinder: it uses the somewhat standard Multi Media Card (MMC) flash cards, available and inexpensive in sizes up to 128 to 256M. Because the iFinder uses a swappable card, you can store as many maps as you like on a big card or lots of cheaper little cards.
Smarter still, you can pop the card out, write a map to it with your PC, and pop it back in. This is much much faster (by orders of magnitude!) than downloading maps over a serial connection, which is what the Magellan and Garmin units require.
Pinpoint Accuracy with WAAS
GPS isn't accurate to more than about 30 feet, even after the Clinton administration disabled the feature which made the satellites deliberately inaccurate to non-military receivers. Even that level of accuracy requires a good quality receiver and a fairly clear view of the sky. That's where the WAAS feature comes in.
WAAS is a set of extra geosynchronous GPS satellites hovering down around the low southwestern and southeastern horizons. A receiver capable of using the signal from these extra satellites can be accurate down to about 10 feet when it "locks on" to them.
This used to be an extra-cost feature, something only higher-end GPS handhelds had. It's built right into the very affordable iFinder. It's also a 12-channel parallel receiver, which most current model GPS units are except for a few cheap models. Even if you don't choose the iFinder, make sure whatever you get has 12 channel parallel reception. If you don't, the thing is going to be less accurate and it will more easily lose its signal under adverse conditions.
Using the Thing
After you get your map and waypoints into it, the iFinder has two major modes of operation: an "easy" mode which locks away access to some of the harder-to-understand functions and settings, and an "advanced" mode which gives you access to everything.
And everything is a pretty generous assortment: The iFinder can display your position as an arrow on a zoomable, scrollable map. It can display a compass-like screen to direct you to your destination. It can show a tremendous amount of numerical detail with your coordinates, altitude, heading, speed, distance, and tons of other statistics. There's also a mode which shows visually how well the unit is receiving its satellite signals.
You can easily search the built-in database to find, for example, gas stations, grocery stores, restaurants, parks, military bases, as well as tons of other places. With a push of a button, the iFinder shows you which way to go.
It doesn't give driving directions, or route you along roads and trails, but with access to the zoomable map this doesn't hurt much. Most GPS receivers don't offer this feature, with a few expensive exceptions. What I do is stick the iFinder on the dashboard and hook it up to a laptop with map software when I need driving directions (I use Topo 4.0, but there are lots of similar products to choose from).
And hooking it up to a PC is easy, with the serial cable that is available separately. Plug it in, change one setting on the iFinder, and your PC knows where it is and where it's going.
You can also add an external antenna, which I haven't found to be necessary at all, even in the car or under moderate to heavy tree cover. If you do get an antenna, you need one of two kinds: a re-radiating unit or an unpowered antenna. A powered antenna will not work with the iFinder, even though it fits on the standard MCX antenna plug. I didn't know this when I bought my kit, and I picked the wrong kind. Fortunately, it turns out the iFinder gets a good, strong signal under a variety of conditions. I don't need the antenna at all. The iFinder locks on to the signal, stays locked on, and gives accurate data which is easy to use.
What's Not So Good?
There's one missing feature which seems like no big deal at first, but has come to drive me batty. Even though there is a serial cable, and it works when you use it to output location information to a PC, you can't transfer any other data over it. This includes waypoints.
That's right, you can't sit down at your PC with a nice big screen, set up routes and waypoints, and sync them to the iFinder. In order to send or receive waypoints, routes, and trails with the iFinder you have to dump that data to the MMC flash card, take out the batteries, pull out the card, and load that data into your PC. And don't be fooled: even software that claims to work with Lowrance GPS doesn't do this, because while all of their other units support serial data transfer, the iFinder just doesn't have it.
Depending on how you plan to use your iFinder, this might be no big deal at all. Because I use mine for geocaching, which means I download waypoints from a web site and then put them into the iFinder, this omission drives me absolutely crazy. Especially because very little of the software out there reads and writes Lowrance's special file format. In my case, I had to write my own! (As an aside, let it be said that Lowrance is extremely supportive of anyone who wants to write software that works with their products. They are responsive and helpful to all kinds of questions.)
There's one other missing feature which might turn you away from the iFinder: It's not waterproof or water resistant AT ALL. The case isn't watertight, and it has a normal snap-on plastic battery cover like most handheld electronics do. If you get it wet, you will break it. Lowrance provides an "aqua bag," a tough and sealable plastic sack, to put your iFinder in. I have yet to use it, but it seems like it would be a little awkward. If you're planning to use a GPS unit in wet weather conditions, the iFinder might not be your best first choice.
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