Product Description

* This is the "user manual" that didn't come with any of the 30 million GPS receivers currently in use, showing readers how to modify, tweak, and hack their GPS to take it to new levels!
* Crazy-cool modifications include exploiting secret keycodes, revealing hidden features, building power cords and cables, hacking the battery and antenna, protecting a GPS from impact and falls, making a screen protector, and solar-powering a GPS
* Potential power users will take the function and performance of their GPS to a whole new level by hacking into the firmware and hacking into a PC connection with a GPS
* Fear not! Any potentially dangerous mod (to the device) is clearly labeled, with precautions listed that should be taken
* Game time! Readers can check out GPS games, check into hacking geocaching, and even use a GPS as a metal detector

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #396269 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 358 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780764584244
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From the Back Cover
You'll get lost in this book, but nowhere else

Your GPS is a really cool toy, but what if you could make it even cooler? What if you could build and hook up data cables, modify your iPAQ cradle to take a GPS connection, tweak the firmware, hook up to your PC without expensive software, use GPS data in a hundred creative ways, even solar-power your GPS? Suppose you could beef up your "first to find" quotient when geocaching, or use your GPS as a super-accurate clock. Well, you can. Read on—your adventure is just beginning!

Here's how to soup up your GPS

Covers both Garmin and Magellan models

1. Crack the secret codes
2. Build auxiliary battery packs
3. Navigate with your GPS
4. Make power and data cables
5. Sharpen your signal
6. Keep firmware update
7. Hack out a PC connectio
8. Create and load dat
9. Grab screenshots on the move
10. Set up an atomic clock
11. Customize GPS games
12. Discover paper-free geocaching

About the Author
Kathie Kingsley-Hughes has authored several technical/programming books and contributes regularly to a variety of forums on GPS and other high-tech outdoor devices. A zealous hiker, backpacker, and geocacher, she is rarely seen without her GPS (and usually a digital camera, spare batteries, sleeping bag, and similar survival gear!)

Customer Reviews

Useful Info, Dreadful Editing
There are nuggets of useful information in this book, but they are somewhat thinly scattered among a lot of very clumsy sentences, some of which don't parse at all. Whoever edited this (or didn't) did a real disservice to the author. If the subject is of value to you, get a used version soon (before the info goes out of date), and don't pay a lot for it, or you'll regret the expense.

Also, I found it helpful to have some small Post-Its, to put tabs on the 30 or so pages with really useful information.

Lots of VERY basic information
If you have spent any time with your GPS unit you will find little if any new information in here. A lot of the book covers the basics that you will already know... and there is a whole chapter devoted to how to take a screenshoot of your GPS screens. The chapter is just a lot of pictures of screens.
There are snippets of useful information but they are far and few between. It is only because of these few snippets that I give it a two.
Save your money, spend an hour online at a good GPS site and you will be further ahead.

Complete waste of money.
This book offers nothing more than little tidbits of information. Even to that end, all of this information is available online at various sites. This is a complete waste of money. You won't "hack" anything, but you will waste your money. A big disappointment!!!