Ken's Musings about the Magellan MAP 330 GPS

Last updated: Monday, 28 March 2005 14:08 -0500

The Story

At Christmas 1999 I received a Magellan 100 GPS as a gift. It was definitely a low-end unit, and deliberately -- my wife wasn't sure I was into GPS and didn't want to blow a lot of money on something that didn't interest me.

The Magellan 100 was the first GPS unit I had ever owned, and I got it back when the satellites were still fudging their reports for civilians. I was fascinated, but I could guess there was a lot more -- the 100 essentially told you where you were and your heading (if you were in motion), but not a lot else. It was also difficult to get it to see enough satellites to get a fix, the car mounting unit was a pain, the power button was easily triggered (I had to stop wearing it on my belt), and everything would be lost if the batteries ran out.

Sometime between December 2000 and now, I found myself in a Fry's Electronics in California, and decided to upgrade. I ended up staying with Magellan and getting a MAP 330.

The featureful differences between the 100 and the MAP 330 are significant. To address the things I found deficient about the 100,

• The power button is a little harder to trigger, and a positive response is required for the unit to complete power-on. If you don't press the right key within a few seconds, it turns itself off again. That means I'm wearing it on my belt again. :-)
• Battery persistence is quite significant; I think you have several hours of memory retention with the batteries removed. And the memory power footprint is so low that the batteries have to really be dead before you'll lose data. (Which you can always upload for safekeeping, too.)
• The car mount is a significant improvement over the one supplied with the 100; it has a flexible gooseneck and suction cups for mounting on the window (or a smooth-enough dashboard).
• The MAP 330 is much more aggressive and capable when it comes to finding satellites, and can track more of them (a total of twelve at once, I think).

Good Stuff

If you're into GPS technology, the mapping capabilities of the MAP 330 unit won't be a surprise. However, I wasn't and they were. I found it really, really cool that I could download up to 8MiB of area map details (that's like pretty much all of the Triangle area of North Carolina, USA, for instance -- over 100 square miles) to the unit, and then enter a street address when in the car and get a bearing, distance, and constantly updating map as I approached the destination.

The map display is zoomable, from out far enough to show both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, to in close enough that only an area only a couple of hundred feet on a side is shown.

The backlight makes the display easily readable at night, which is a nice touch and highly useful when in unfamiliar territory after dark.

The unit maintains a list of track points; apparently recording one almost every time it takes a fix. This track can be uploaded to the PC programme for storage.

Although it takes a while to get used to the menus, being able to mark coördinates (such as when on a trip) and name them for later use is very useful. It sounds silly, but I've used the unit to find my way back to a restaurant I hadn't been to in a while. :-).

The features in the unit are excellent, and the interface with the PC support programme (street map availability, upload and download capability, data display on PC) is pretty good. It uses a serial port, though, which means map transfers are rather slow. On a trip to New England last year, I was able to download street information for about three fourths of Massachusetts and part of New Hampshire. That was as much as I needed, but it was also as much as it could hold. :-)

Issues

On the whole, I'm quite pleased with the MAP 330. There are a couple of areas that could maybe use some improvement, though:

• Suction Cups. I suppose there's really not much that can be done about it, but I found that it's Very Important to detach the GPS mount from the driver's window before rolling it down. I failed to do this once, and one of the three cups didn't know when to let go and got inexorably sucked down into the interior of the door.
• Track Recording. When I tried to upload my track after a particularly broad excursion, only part of it came through. I suspect there might be a coöordinate limit to the upload processing.
• Non-U.S. Maps. Even though I registered my unit, I haven't received any notification of street map availability for non-U.S. regions. I hope Magellan corrects this deficiency!
• Noise. As you might expect, the unit is silent -- except when the backlight is turned on. When the light is on, there's a faint but perceptible whine (from the voltage inverter, I assume), which can become annoying.
• Serial Interface. The data transfer pathway is to a PC serial port, so it's kinda slow. USB or FireWire would be nice.
• Power and Data Cabling. As supplied, the mounting bracket has both the automobile power fixture and the data cable integrated, so you have to bring the whole mounting unit in order to upload or download data. Separate cables are available, but they're extra and not included in the base package (at least not the one I purchased).

Conclusion

I didn't shop around for a unit; I basically stayed with the first manufacturer I encountered (the one I received as a gift). However, I continue to hear good things about them, and I'm really pleased with the unit. I recommend it unreservedly.