DeLorme PN-40

I have been using a PN40 for about 2 months now.

Originally I thought I'd sell my Garmin eTrex Vista HCX but now I am glad I did not.

The PN40 needs more polish. (That's a very short review isn't it.)

Software and maps for the PN-40

Topo 8.0

It appears to be very inaccurate. When I have an aerial photo loaded, I can see myself walking right down the sidewalk in the photo but the street overlay will be 5 or so meters off.

Street Atlas 2009

maybe it's accurate, but forget it, you can't transfer SA data into the PN40.

XMap 6.2

It's basically Topo 8 with some extra features.

USB to Serial

There is a program on the DeLorme site that you can use to take the live data coming in over USB and fan it out as one or more NMEA serial data streams. This means you can feed several client programs running on a Windows desktop machine at the same time. It also means you might not have to do anything at all with the binary protocol if you just want to get NMEA position data.

Binary protocol

The "DeLBin" (DeLorme Binary) Protocol spec is downloadable from the DeLorme forums as a PDF.

GPSbabel

July 2009 - Currently to get DeLBin support in gpsbabel you need to compile from cvs sources.

It seems to work fine on my Ubuntu desktop.

Here is a command to transfer waypoints from the PN-40 device to a GPX file.

sudo ./gpsbabel -i delbin -f usb -o gpx  -F test.gpx

(I used "sudo" because I have a permissions issue with the USB device that I should fix!)

Building gpsbabel from sources

Login to server

cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/gpsbabel login

Checkout source code - this will create a gpsbabel directory right here.

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/gpsbabel co -P gpsbabel

I needed to install one package to get the usb.h file.

apt-get install libusb-dev

Build and install

./configure
make 
sudo make install

Remove your old Ubuntu version if you have one.

sudo apt-get remove gpsbabel

(If you had a copy you should log out and log back in to update your path, the new version will be installed in /usr/local/bin instead of /usr/bin)

Now if you type "gpsbabel -h" at the command prompt you should get a lengthy list of supported formats that includes this block

delbin                DeLorme PN-20/PN-30/PN-40 USB protocol              
  get_posn              (0/1) Return current position as a waypoint       
  logs                  (0/1) Include groundspeak logs when writing       
  long_notes            (0/1) Use long waypoint notes regardless of PN ver

ArcMap support

You can buy the $250 ArcMap extension, I have a copy now and have tried it once or twice. You can move vector GIS data into the device and you can move data from the device into shapefiles without any extra steps. It seems very nice so far.

Jumping through some hoops, if you want to work with Topo 8 you can transfer track(s) from the PN-40 to a desktop, then in the Draw tab you can export the tracks as GPX data. Then you can convert the GPX files to ESRI shapefiles using DNR Garmin.