Travel navigators have never become a mass gadget – the high price discouraged many buyers back then, when there was simply no alternative. Now that even the most inexpensive smartphones have a GPS-module, the interest in navigators has fallen to a minimum. But if the car navigators are almost replaced by smartphones, the tourist navigators are still in demand among many travelers, tourists and athletes.

The producers continue to produce new models, but they are not in a hurry to disappear from the shelves. What are the advantages that make the fans of travel navigators to remain faithful to these devices?

Reliability. The variety of hardware and software smartphones in this perspective is rather a minus – there is no guarantee that your model navigation application will not fail at the most important moment. At the same time, the software and hardware of the tourist navigators are designed to meet the increased demands for the reliability of the device.

Service life. The turned on GPS-module smartphone greatly accelerates the discharge of the battery, a rare smartphone will be able to work in navigation mode at least 5-6 hours. The battery life of the navigators ranges from 12 hours to several days.
Protection against external influences. Most of the travel navigators are able to safely tolerate low temperatures, strikes and immersion in water. In addition, the protection level of even the simplest navigators is much higher than that of the majority of the “protected” smartphones.

They are powered by standard AA or AAA cells. It is much easier and cheaper to take with you “spare” a few sets of regular batteries than a few batteries for your smartphone.
Reliable signal reception from satellites. Navigation is still not a priority for smartphones, and GPS-modules in them are often installed on a residual principle. As a result, the search for satellites can take dozens of minutes, and the lack of a decent GPS antenna – can lead to enough trees overhead or even just clouds to lose the signal from the satellites. The tourist navigator not only has a reliable built-in antenna and a sensitive receiver, most of them are equipped with a jack to connect the external GPS antenna, which can significantly improve signal reception in difficult conditions.

To summarize, we can say that in summer in a populated area for fishing, hunting or hiking “weekend” smartphone with a navigation application may be enough – even if it fails, nothing irreparable will happen. But for “wild” places or cold weather – when your life may depend on the ability to determine your location – the travel navigator is beyond competition.

In addition, tourist GPS navigators are used as a means of sports fixation in some sports: in sailing regattas, in aeronautics, in gliding, hang gliding and paragliding, etc. And there is no way to replace them with a smartphone.

Having decided to have a tourist navigator, determine the nature of its use – in different conditions will be relevant different characteristics of this device.

The characteristics of travel navigators
Given the fact that in the dual-band mode the device consumes more energy (and therefore works less without recharging), in flat areas there is no advantage of dual-band navigators – to save the battery it is better to switch them to the mode “GPS only”.

The other thing is in the mountains. To determine the coordinates the navigator should receive a signal from 4 satellites. If part of the sky is closed by a mountain slope, in the field of view may simply not be the right number of satellites. And in this case, the support of the second range will increase the chance of determining your own location.

In the travel navigator you can save a certain number of routes – paths that pass through certain waypoints (sets of coordinates defining a certain point on the map). In the route mode, the navigator will display the direction to the next waypoint and the deviation from the current route line.

The number of routes that can be saved in the memory of the navigator is limited – usually there are no more than 250.

While driving (at certain intervals), the navigator saves the current position – records a waypoint. The time interval for saving waypoints can be changed within a wide range; a waypoint can also be set manually. An important point here is that the number of waypoints is also limited. In different models there can be from 2000 to 10000, and you should pay special attention to this parameter.

For example, if your navigator can store up to 2000 waypoints, and you set the interval of saving waypoints in 1 second, then after half an hour the device memory will be full.