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A little bit about us

My name is Andreas van Hooijdonk. My wife Chantal and I live in Belgium, where we do a lot of walks and trips with the car. I have always been crazy about maps and when we bought our first GPS receiver (a Garmin GPSII) in 1996, maps became even more important. We first used a map together with the GPS receiver in Cyprus. Even with a simple 1 : 150,000 Tourist Map, the combination proved to be very useful. The simple fact to know where you are in an unfamiliar region, gives you so much peace of mind, that you enjoy much more your holidays.

Later came Topographic maps. Even Russian military maps, which are extremely detailed and precise. With Topo maps you can plan ahead. Especially for walks in the country-side, you need information about every trail and other details. In the beginning we hand-coded the waypoints into our GPS receiver. This is rather tedious and now we use mapping software on the desktop computer to plan every detail and send all information at once to the GPS receiver. Sometimes we think that this is the most exiting part of our holidays.

Nowadays we use our GPS receiver (a Garmin GPS76 with external active antenna), connected to a pocketPC with routing software, to let us guide to the exact start-point of a walk, especially at long distance from home. The routing software allows us to choose between the quickest route or the shortest one. If we do not travel over too long a distance, we often choose the shortest route, as this guides us over all kinds of small roads and through little villages, that we otherwise would maybe never have known.

And when we just walk around a bit, without planning, we sometimes use our GPS receiver and the pocketPC to show us on a moving (topo) map where we are, without even thinking about waypoints or routes or anything GPS. Don’t worry, we sometimes do leave the house without GPS.

We built this site in order to share our knowledge about everything GPS and navigation in general. One year after the start of our site we realize that ‘navigation’ has become a small part of the site, as we discovered so many other interesting GPS-related topics. We will continue searching for such topics, analyze them and publish the results on this site.

And after a lot of fun with GPS and a lot of questions from our readers, we realize that GPS is not perfect and can not do everything all alone. Sometimes other technologies can do a job better than GPS and sometimes GPS needs some help from other wireless technologies. In order to have an oversight of the whole of possibilities, we also follow the news of several different wireless technologies and report the results on this web site.

Hopefully you like the site and will find something of special interest to you. If you would like to contact us, you can reach us via the form below. Please understand that we can not answer any model-specific questions (except for the GPS76) and that we do not sell any products.

Kind regards.

Andreas van Hooijdonk

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