The MAGELLAN PIONEER GPS Receiver
George  Aumann  and Rick Nahas describe  their  experiences  with 
their new Magellan Pioneer GPS receivers.

Here are George Aumann's comments.
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I  bought  it while on travel as a toy to play with on  a  flight 
from Los Angeles to Boston and back, because the prize was right, 
because  it  is very small and because it claimed to run  for  24 
hours continuous.

Here is what I found out: Overall, it works very well.

It  works well from a window seat in commercial airplanes  (B767) 
at 500+mph and 40,000ft altitude. (I clamp it with an  improvised  
paperclip  bracket to the window). With the help of a map  I  was 
able  to  identify  the names of town or rivers  visible  on  the 
ground.

Battery  lifetime seems to be in excess of 24 hours with  two  AA 
alkaline  cells  (with backlite off). When  the  battery  warning 
light comes on there are two more hours of operations left before 
the unit turns itself off.

Mounting  it on the dashboard of my car, it tracks nicely on  the 
open  road. Accuracy seems to be limited by the SA, so trying  to 
find my way into my garage does not work. With the GPS sitting on 
my  workbench  (plugged  into an external  power  supply  with  a 
homebrew  adapter)  the apparent position  fluctuated  consistent 
with  the SA limitation,  with 95% of the readings within  a  100 
meter circle (using about 50 readings taken every 12 hours).

The GPS shows how many satellites have been accquired of the ones 
which  should  be available based on almanac data.  I  have  seen 
numbers as high as 8, but 5 and 6 are typical. When three or more 
satellite  have  been accquired and the satellite  positions  are 
consistent  with  a high quality solution, the  GPS  display  say 
"tracking". I don't know what it does with any of the  satellites 
in excess of the minimum four required to do a 3D solution.  Some 
kind  of filtering is going on. When a 3D solution  is  available 
and  the  last elevation was 39000ft, but the true  elevation  is 
near zero (like after landing in Boston), the elevation decreases 
at a maximum rate of 100 ft/second (i.e. per solution update).

In  some  difficult positions, no position  is  determined.  This 
happened  on  one flight for about one hour. Hiking in  a  narrow 
canyon or under heavy tree cover is supposed to be a problem, but 
only  once  did I  fail to get a position fix  within  2  minute, 
mostly the fix is determined in 30 seconds, if the last  solution 
is no more than 30 minutes old.

Overall:  It  seems to work very well, if one does not  mind  the 
inability to connect to a computer.

George Aumann NE6FE
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Here are Rick Nahas Comments.

The Magellan Pioneer GPS

The Pioneer 63000, is a $99 hand-held GPS receiver that uses  two 
channels to track up to 12 satellites. This multiplexing receiver 
has 3 navigation screens displaying standard information such  as 
BRG,  DIS,  TRK,  GS,  ALT, ETE, ETA, Speed  etc..  but  no  user 
definable  screens. Magellan claims accuracy a 49ft  RMS  without 
Selective Availability.

Some  of  the features of the Pioneer are:  rubber  coated  back, 
waterproof, 24 hour battery life on 2 AAs, Screen  back-lighting, 
contrast control, battery gauge, 100 user waypoints, 1 route with 
10 legs. 

While Pioneer has no data or antenna port, in my opinion it makes 
a  good  all  around (entry level) unit.  Whether  for  aviation, 
hiking, or marine use it is the least expensive GPS on the market 
and provides the basic information one needs to navigate.


Rick Nahas