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Author:
Francis Ononye

There has been a lot of reported vehicle break-ins with satellite navigations units stolen from the vehicles. This I will say is partly due to the growing popularity of satellite navigation units.

A lot of the owners leave the windscreen mounts of these devices attached to the windscreen when they detach the units, this is a give away signal that leads to the vehicle being broken into with the vandal looking for the device in the dashboard.

My solution is simple, get a windows or symbian smartphone, that is compatible with a navigation software and use that for your navigational needs. These smartphones are really getting smarter, you would want to look for a series 60, 80, or 90 symbian phone or any windows powered mobile phone. Bluetooth functionality is a prerequisite as that is what is used to connect to mobile phone to the portable bluetooth gps receiver. Get yourself a compact buetooth gps unit like the holux gpslim 236, that is currently the smallest unit and you are done.

Before you talk about screen size, I will say the screen size isn't that bad at all from experience. Most smartphones have enough screen display size to do the gps justice. There are a lot of advantages to this setup. One thing I will say is I have never heard of a car being broken into because of a phone cradle in sight but leave a gps cradle in sight and you could be asking for trouble.

In the United Kingdom you can get a free contract smartphone like the nokia 6630/6680 and alternatively if windows is your thing you can get an orange spv c500/c550/c600 or the t-mobile variants, you can get a navigation software with a bluetooth gps receiver for less than £200 and you are good to go.

Francis Ononye writes about satellite navigation

| Article Keywords: GPS

A Quick Note From The Publisher... If you like the article above, you may be interested in the following article which is also related to GPS... GPS Navigation Systems: What Next? Technology has achieved many useful developments in satellite navigation systems that allow a small electronic device to navigate its exact location (Longitude, Latitude and Altitude) through satellite. When it knows its position, the navigation device calculates the navigation information including terrain, directions, roads and more. Nowadays, most vehicles come with the satellite navigation devices pre-installed in them. These devices are generally used by motor vehicle drivers, military, outdoorsmen, boaters and for other military applications. The well known satellite system that is fully functional at the time of this writing is the GPS or the Global Navigation System. GPS in the United States contains 24 to 27 satellites orbiting at an altitude of approximately 20,000 km with an inclination of 55 degrees in six different planes. The Russian counterpart to GPS is called the GLONASS, which is derived from GLObal Navigation Satellite System. Though the initial satellites for GLONASS were launched in 1982, the system was not fully operational till 1995. The GLONASS has deteriorated to only 12 satellites, due to economic difficulties. The Russian GLONASS constellation is expected to become fully functional by 2010 and there are plans to include India as well. The European Union is working on EGNOS derived from European Geostationary Navigation Overlay System. It consists of 3 satellites intending to supplement the GPS and GLONASS systems by determining the accurate signals and position with in 5 meters. It is expected to function in 2006. The European Space Agency is working on introducing an alternative to GPS, called Galileo. The receivers will be able to combine the signals of 30 Galileo satellites and 28 GPS satellites to get highly accurate positions. ...