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TomTom ONE XL 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Maps of the U.S. and Canada (Factory Refurbished)
$279.99
This is a great GPS, very easy to use and get where you need to go. However, the suction cup is not all that great and it keeps falling off my windshield. Also, it takes a long time to find a GPS signal even out on a road with no blockage. Otherwise, I really enjoy this product.

Garmin n���vi 260W 4.3-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator
$229.99
I really wanted to like this GPS unit, but it had several annoying flaws.

PROS:
- It was very accurate - we were in a very small town with several new streets and it gave us good directions - we didn't get any wrong directions and recognized every street. No complaints for accuracy and it did a great job of recalculating if you missed a turn or chose to go a different way.

CONS:
- There is no way to select your route - for example, driving up and down California you can choose between two major highways (I-5 or Hwy 99) - we had no choice of picking one. Maybe this is only available on more expensive GPS units? Once we got on our route, it would recalculate, but what if we didn't know how to get to that particular highway?? You can avoid ALL highways, but there was no way to avoid specific highways. You can also add VIA points, but that is a hassle and you'd have to look at a map to find cities along the route you want to take in order to add them and get the GPS to take you on that route. Isn't the purpose of a GPS to avoid maps altogether??
- There is no easy way to access points of interest - you have to select MENU, then WHERE TO, then POINTS OF INTEREST, then which type of interest, etc. If you are driving down the road (without a "copilot" to work your GPS) this is not practical! Also, to get back to your map, you have to hit BACK until you get out of that menu (several times!) Again, not practical when you are driving - there should be a one touch to get back to your original map/directions.
- There is a WHERE AM I feature (you just touch the traveling car) and it gives you your coordinates, nearest town and you can choose from HOSPITALS, POLICE STATIONS, and FUEL. Really? Who needs to get to the nearest police station? More practical would be nearest rest areas or restaurants.
- To find the nearest rest area you need to go through several touch menus. (It was MENU, WHERE TO, POINTS OF INTEREST, scroll down to the THIRD page to find AUTO SERVICES, scroll down a page to find REST AREA/TOURIST INFO - then it gave us several rest areas - some of which were on OTHER highways and some that we had already driven past - we had to select each one of them to see if it was even on the highway we were traveling on. NOT very practical to have to use nine touches to the screen to find a rest area???
- The touch screen was not very responsive - I had to use a pencil eraser to save my sanity. For example, when entering an address using the keyboard it would select a key 2 over from the one I actually pushed - lots of backspacing!! Also, dragging the map around to see ahead was painstaking.
- The zoom feature was weird (a "+" and a "-" to zoom in and out) and I never could get it to zoom the way I wanted it to.

All in all, an okay unit (esp. for the price) but it will be returned and I *hope* to find one that has the features I am looking for. We were impressed with it's accuracy and good directions but too many other annoyances for us to keep it. It is our first foray into GPS and we will keep looking!

Celestial Navigation in the GPS Age
$24.95
I cannot possibly say enough good things about this book. It is so well authored, so well written, and so thorough that anyone interested in CelNav would be completely amiss not to buy this book. Because I spend so much time studying the subject, I came to a point where I began studying the algorithms, celestial mechanics, and mathematical theory behind CelNav and wanted to move into deeper, more intensive areas of the subject with the intention of eventually being able to calculate the very orbits that we derive our almanac data from....however, I was unable to break into this seemingly unattainable realm because of the overwhelming circular nature of the texts and dicussions that tend to predominate regarding the subject. THIS BOOK was the key that unlocked those areas for me. You will find yourself amazed at how much "meat" each and every line of this book contains, it's as though each sentence offers new and equally important light to the study of CelNav. You will, as I did, I'm quite sure, read and re-read this book with the result that your understanding of CelNav will be deepened a hundred-fold. If the price of books were determined by the significance of their contents, this one would cost millions.

TomTom ONE 130 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator (Factory Refurbished)
$129.95
I received a TomTom One new as a gift. Right away, I noticed the maps are significantly out of date. My neighborhood of 5,000 lots has public streets (county maintenance) and was built in 1994 and earlier. Many of the streets are missing, mis-named and in the wrong place. My own street is not on the map, so when I turn the unit on, it cannot define a starting location, cannot define my "home" location, and when I try to travel home from afar, it cannot find my street as a destination. Many changes occasioned by 911 are also not updated. I used to put numerous map corrections into the TomTom unit, but they disappeared into cyberspace. TomTom referred me to TeleAtlas, the company that makes their maps. I put a significant number of changes into TeleAtlas. I paid for quarterly updates from TomTom, but two updates have come out since purchase and none of the streets have been updated. The device is generally good in traveling somewhere, but one has to be on guard for spurious directions from the device approximately 1% of the time. Except for the maps, it is a good device.