Lowrance Expedition C

[+synergicity]

This will be pretty freeform as I wanted to get something before calling it a night.

 

I received the Expedition C (which is a silly name because there is no other kind of Expedition) this afternoon. I threw 2 freshly charged NiMH AA batteries in and turned it on. The very first thing you notice is the display...it is spectacular, 2.25" x 1.70" at 320 x 240 pixels, 256 color TFT - that's 140 dpi if I did my math right. It is real nice or as my daughter says, "Tight!" which means really good I guess.

 

I told it where we were on the earth and then left it on the window sill for a while and let it get settled. It acquired 6-8 satellites within a few minutes and was able to maintain lock on some of them even in the center of our building (old, wooden) about 30 feet from the window. Walking outside I was able to get WAAS lock once the sky was available and EPE stayed around 19 feet. Without WAAS it was around 30 ft. I went after a cache I knew of nearby and it placed me within 4 feet but told me EPE was still 30 feet. I hunted a second cache I hadn't found yet nearby and was able to find it under thick tree cover but was only able to get within 20 feet of the spot according to the Expedition. I will do a lot more testing when I have more time and can bring my Sportrak Map with me for comparison. One thing I didn't miss at all was the overshoot I had gotten used to with the Magellan.

 

The magnetic compass is nice and the barometric altimeter performed well under pressure. Both are new features to me and I haven't yet figured out how important they will be. I can see the compass being handy, but I always carry an old-school compass when I am hiking or caching.

 

Before I went out I loaded up a new 1 gb SD card into the supplied LEI card reader and fired up MapCreate. Granted that my version of the Magellan topo software is a couple of years old, but Mapcreate really is superior to what I had. The topo data is much more detailed, and the road and POI is way beyond what Magellan provided. I made four map sections starting around Fresno, to SF, then No. Cal, then the western 2/3 of Oregon and the same portion of Washinton. The map chunks are 87 mb, 160 mb, 256 mb, and 320 mb. They fit on the card along with the closest 500 caches to me which I processed from a geocaching.com GPX file to a USR file using GSAK. I didn't expect it but the GPS smoothly transitions from one map section to another without me having to do anything. I had to manual tell it to load the waypoints from the card to memory, but now they are there.

 

There are 6 screens, but one is the mp3 playing screen which I turned off. The five left are the map, the compass, the goto (which is compass-like but shows your track and the approaching waypoint marker), the satellites, and the status which shows pressure in the top half and your choice of 6 data items. The goto and map screens allow you to view 8 data items or 4 items and current coordinates. The compass screen has the battery meter plus 6 data items or 2 items and current coordinates. I would love the status screen if I could get the pressure off the top half and add more data instead. I will have to get used to this. The map and goto screens can be zoomed manually or you can choose auto-zoom so that the zoom increases as you get closer. I haven't tried this yet but will soon.

 

Again, I will do more testing in the woods and with another GPS along. This is just the first impressions. Oh, yeah, it's big, glossy black and clear plastic which takes fingerprints easily. It's comfortable in my hand, but might not be for smaller hands (I'm 6'2"). The buttons are OK, all are above the surface of the face except the power/backlight and the Pages button which switches screens. And the display -- wow is all I can say about that.

 

Edit: I just found that the up/down arrows cycle the pressure window on the status screen to altimeter history and then to current coordinates which is what I wanted. Yippee!

Edited February 8, 2006 by synergicity

[+Airmapper]

As a happy Lowrance user myself, I think anything you do not like about the unit as far as displays can be changed to the way you like it, their layouts are very flexible.

 

On your EPE, it sounds right on, Lowrance units always seem to show a greater EPE than expected. I was talking with a surveyor about it, and he said that the Lowrance gave a more realistic EPE. Lowrance's are a dead ringer for caching, in a fairly open area I can zero out the distance 90% of the time, and it will keep you in a very small area as far as drifting is concerned.

 

I'm actually quite impressed by your description, I own a 2-year old Lowrance, and I can tell they have come a long way since then.

[wassilj]

I too just got my Expedition. Great unit if you don't mind the lack of autorouting. For $250, you get EVERYTHING except that. There are some small issues, though. The mp3 player status screen only shows bitrates to 128k. Maybe a firmware upgrade will more accurately show cbr, vbr and the right encoding rate. The unit seems far more accurate than the EPE would suggest. Heck, I can see myself rocking in my family room away from any windows with 9 sats locked and without WAAS! By the way, the Navionics and Lowrance lake maps are absolutely the best. It's the reason I got the Lowrance. Dead nut right on for scopin' out your fishing spots. The other little thing is the rubber doors that cover the antenna connection and plug-in port. This should have been designed with a bit more forethought. Not bad, but not the best either. They will flop open once in a while. The last nitpicky thing is that the unit MUST be held perfectly horizontal to the ground for the electronic compass to be 100% accurate. One last thing. The waypoint storage / management is unbelievable. If done right, you can store thousands over hundereds of trails without even going to the memory card. All in all, a cool unit for about half of the Garmins.

[budule]

mine is on the way... it wiil be my first one so i cant compare it to anything ,,but after lots and lots of

price checkin it blows the others away.... unit + topo maps + 12volt adapter+ram mount +external antenna

still came in well under 400.oo ...