Product Review

submitted 27 Aug 16:09
by roadtrippr

Earthmate GPS LT-40 - the $49 USB GPS Receiver

I came home on Monday to a box from Deloreme on the front door. When I opened it I was pleasantly surprised to see one of their recently released USB GPS receivers, the GPS LT-40. Also bundled was a copy of Street Atlas 2009, mimicking their $69 bundle ($49 from amazon).

Since I have a Macbook, I couldn’t readily use Street Atlas 2009 since it is Windows only. Having both a Windows XP Bootcamp partition, as well as a Windows XP Parallels Virtual machine, I wasn’t discouraged at all. Before I fired up the virtual for testing, I did some investigating on any Mac options out there.

My first thought was Google Earth but that idea was quickly put to bed, while they do offer GPS within Google Earth, it requires a paid pro version. I then remembered a product called Route66, which was available for the Mac a few years ago, but alas, they seemed to have stopped supporting OS X in 2004.

After booting up my WinXP Virtual in Parallels, I went ahead and installed Street Atlas 2009. The install went rather quickly, and in no time at all I was inside the program. Before hooking up the GPS Device I decided to poke around in the application. The last time I had used Street Atlas was around 2002, and a lot has changed since then. While I found the application to be very powerful, I was initially overwhelmed by the number of options on the screen. After a few minutes of getting accustomed to the application, I found it pretty easy to navigate.

Street Atlas is pretty powerful and customizable when you get down to it. When mapping out an extended roadtrip, you can input your estimated travel time per day, your fuel tank size, MPG and cost, have it warn you when you get close. With it’s million’s of Points of Interest it can even help you find a gas station when needed. It will even give you the sunrise and sunset time so you can get an early start. You can even calculate routes if you were walking or riding a bicycle.

I decided at this point to hook up the LT-40 and see what it could do. After plugging it in, and assigning the USB port to the virtual, Windows automatically found the receiver and installed the drivers, a minute or two later I hit the Start GPS button from within Street Atlas and let it acquire a signal. The first time took about 2-3 minutes before it had a signal, but I had a semi obstructed view of the sky, I was sitting on the commuter rail. Once the device had it’s signal, it was very accurate. It was able to tell me the speed of the train and it’s direction, updating at the slightest change. What really impressed me was the whole system’s performance, even though this was running inside of a virtual, you could never tell.

At this point I attempted to use the NavMode, which is a 3D driving mode found on many other GPS Devices. Unfortunately I had some trouble with this aspect. I couldn’t see any roads, but I think that had to do with me riding on the train, I wasn’t on any roads. In my followup review I will be taking this on a journey around town and see how it fairs, with both directions and voice commands.

I was very impressed with the bundle, but it’s not for everyone. If your just want easy directions, go with a standalone device. Traveling with a laptop on the passenger seat is not that practical. However, if you are installing a Carputer, or have a laptop and are planning a roadtrip with friends, this device is perfect. The price can’t be beat, at $49(from amazon) with Street Atlas, that is 4-5 times less than a standalone device with the same features.