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MAGELLAN MERIDIAN GOLD GPS HANDHELD |  |
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| Product Reviews from Amazon.com (Rating System 1 to 5) |
| Review | Rating | Last Updated | Worst support
Purchased one of these and when I contacted the manufacturer, Magellan, was told they no longer offer support for the unit but they would gladly allow me some credit towards a newer model. Sure got screwed on that deal! | 1 | Today | Ok for the price
I own one of these for more than a year now. Since then actually I bought a Garmin auto GPS which is much more expensive. The one I bought came with a mapping software, not the direct route. Therefore, it does not help me auto navigate. Only shows my current position. It is very difficult to find a place because of limited menu functions.
However, I found something that may help other users. Contrary to what the manual says, I could use a 512MB SD card and loaded a bunch of maps with USB connection straight to the card using SD card adapter. All you need to do is to limit each file well below 64MB and follow the indexed file naming used by the unit. This worked for me and the unit could recognize all the areas in all the files that I uploaded.
Additionally, it is impossible to upload a lot of data with the supplied serial cable. USB transfer was fast.
Cheers. | 3 | Today | Meridian Gold - Good Value GPS for the Dollar
Meridian Gold - Good value for Hiking and Car Navigating
Pro: The Meridian Gold is good at holding satellite signal. Uses up to 500 Meg SD or 1 Gig SD cards to hold extra detail maps. Serial PC interface to upload / download maps or waypoints with PC.
Con: This is an older Magellan product. About 8 oz. & 2 inches longer than more modern GPS models. Interface to PC is serial not USB, so uploading PC maps to GPS is slow. Instead, better to use a USB card reader to load 64 mb detail maps to SD cards in about 3 minutes. You load the road or topo maps in 64Mb chunks (each 64Mb chunk covers 2 to 4 US states). The MapSend software asks whether to load via serial, load via USB card reader or save to PC harddrive.
Summary: I've used this GPS for mountain biking, hiking, car trips, and positioning antenna tower for a wireless internet service over the last 6 months.
Some discount retail stores have this at $200.
Easy to learn interface. Offers 7 data screens including a plotting map of current position, satellite status, 1 screen with large fonts easy to see while driving, a compass, odometer and other screens. All screens can be customized for type data shown: speed, avg speed, max speed, ETA, distance, bearing, heading, next turn, position error, Course to Steer, Velocity Made Good and others.
20 routes and 500 waypoints. You can edit waypoints on the GPS, but it's easier using Topo, Direct Route or other Magellan MapSend software and serial cable attaching to PC.
Waterproof(IPX7 standard) and rubber armored case. 2 level glowing screen for night which shortens normal 2 AA battery life of 8 hours. Base map is ok for highway driving but I got MapSend TOPO for hiking / mtb riding / detailed streets. GPS seems to accurately track bike trail, max and avg speed of my bike.
Has a great street address look up feature in the GPS that plots the location of a business or home. Very handy for finding parties or restaurants or businesses that I've never been to here in Buckhead/Atlanta.
Great GPS for the dollar. | 5 | Today | Not for Automobile Navigation
Not very functional, screen difficult to read, download information takes forever, doesn't use roads when calculating distances, does line of sight. Need lots of extras to make this even slightly useful. If you are planning to use this in your car, I would definitely get a different product as this is almost worthless. Won't hold much info from software as downloads are limited to 4 regions of about 16K. | 1 | Today | Waterproof exterior? Only if the water is large ice cubes.
It's a bit of a joke to include the word "waterproof" in the title for this product. The battery and memory card cover is so loose you can see right though it to the other side. Small sized hail would be able to get into this unit! Magellan uses the term "rugged and waterproof" on the box, and it does appear somewhat rugged, but by no definition of the word is it waterproof. Other than that ... this is my first experience with a GPS and to me, it seems unnecessarily difficult to use for anything other than "hey look, I'm heading east at 3 mph!". I'll spend the time and try and learn its idiosyncrasies, but I'm disappointed it wasn't more useful straight out of the box. | 2 | Today | not fun without a good map
Owned the unit for over 2 weeks and was very dissappointed at first: the so called built-in base map contains only very major highways and railroads against a huge blank area. most of the time it would show my position in the middle of the blank area - not much fun at all. To add to the frustration, either the unit or the so called bas map was inacurate: i was riding along the 401 but my position was showing some 250 meters south west! this was proved in other situations too.
This inacuracy was corrected with a 100$ topo map. Once installed, everything changed - each and every time the unit positions me exactly where i'm supposed to be. Map accuracy is a whole different matter though (see my review of mapsend topo canada).
Back to the unit: it is very large compared to explorist but appears sturdy - I dropped it on a concrete sidewalk and nothing happened to it.
It does not fit comfortably in my hand - it simply is too big, and I have large hands.
Large screen is a plus.
Battery life is very poor (and i disabled the screen lights!). With the so called base map (blank screen with a small arrow showing your position) it would run about 10 hours on a fresh set of energizers. Once the topo map was installed fresh batteries won't last 3 hours!
Only maps of up to about 15 megabits function well in the unit - anything over and the unit has problems loading them on the screen. This means that you must prepare several small maps and load them onto your SD card.
SD card is a plus - you can have as many maps as you wish provided they are small. I'm using a 64 mb card with several maps of about 10 mb each and everything works smootly.
10 mb map spans an area of about 250 - 300 kilometers. once you leave the area you must manually load a new map area.
Big problem: obsolete parallel connection to your computer. This only proves problematic if you need to upload or download your own waipoints, or upgrade firmware, because maps can be written to an external reader/writer. For instance my laptop does not have a parallel port which means i must decide what maps i need before going on a trip, load them using my desktop and hope it's all i need - but what happens on the road?
On a good note - i found a car mount at a dollar store. it is sold as a cell phone stand but it is adjustable to fit different sizes, and is just perfect for the meridian (at maximum stretch), and i suspect other models too. | 4 | Today | Meridian Gold
This is a good unit. The base map is slim. Mapsend Topo software really enhances the functionality of the unit. The tech support from Magellan/Thales is non-existant. I waited for over an hour on the telephone on two different attempts to get help. I have sent e-mails to the company as well (with no response to my inquiries). I like the GPS but it is a shame that tech support is not readily available. | 3 | Today | Not much improvement on the product line
I used to own a Magellan Sportrak until the screen broke in a fall. I decided to stay with Magellan simply because of laziness of having to learn all other set of buttons and file formats. I went with the Meridian Gold because of its large screen and the fact that it was SD Card capable.
I was surprised to find that the Meridian has more or less the same functionality that my five year old sportrak had.. No innovations in five years. Also, the connector cable that came with the meridian is a 9-pin COM port. None of my computers has a COM port. Everybody uses USB today, why is Magellan so far behind in updating their products? I then thought I would transfer my waypoints through the SD card instead of the cable, however, the file produced by the GPS on an export is not recognized by the TOPO software on the PC. I basically have to write a little excel macro to change the headings and columns so that the topo map can read my waypoint and routes.
I was very disappointed with the fact that Magellan hasn't evolved at all in the last few years. If you have an old GPS and you think you should get new technology from Magellan, I recommend you stick to the old. | 2 | Today | Read the directions, all of them
After reading the reviews from others I am posting a reply to some problems others have had with the Magellan Meridian Gold. I have been using mine for two years, I have also used other Magellan products as well was Garmin products. I have sold GPS gear going beck to before the first gulf war and I have been a retail GPS buyer, I have put issues that others have had in quotes, followed by some simple explanations.
"The only reason I did not give it 5 stars is that it does have the rebound effect or whatever"
Well this is a non issue, if you are geocaching you are going to start looking for a cache when you are within 20-30 feet, just put the GPS in your pocket and start looking.
"I find the Magellan software to be a bit primative. For example, if you add map data for a region to the Meridian memory, it erases all the old map data you had before."
Not if you use a card reader
"Probably the strangest shortcoming is that you can't get the unit to display the map, speed, and odometer at the same time!"
You have to customized the screen to do this.
"The Ugly: Magellan's method of setting routes and backtracking is absolutely terrible for my usage. I am so annoyed with this, I would return it if I hadn't already used it 2 weeks. Here's the deal -
If you go out for the day and retrace your route exacty, or just set it for the car in general it works very well. But so does a few cents worth of flagging, popcorn, or the cheapest GPS available."
Well, this is what a backtrack is, I do not know what this reviewers use would be, but it appears to not be the norm.
"Okay, so you set waypoints along your way using the GPS. Great, it does this well with 2 clicks. But THEN what??? It's back to the problem above."
This person does know what a back track is.
"The GPS consistently showed me 50-500 feet from my actual location."
In two years on using my Meridian gold I have never had this problem, check the map datum
| 5 | Today | Great all round use GPS
I've had my MeriGold for a little over a year now and have been completely satisfied.
I use it in cars, planes, hiking and geocaching. It has great features, but especially the expandable memory is what made the decision for me.
The only reason I did not give it 5 stars is that it does have the rebound effect or whatever, but it is minimal and easily dealt with if you know about it. It really only is an issue while geocaching. In a car or plane or even hiking, it wouldn't be an issue. | 4 | Today |
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