Casual Conversation

I did pizza delivery for years without GPS.

I used a dedicated, very expensive, handheld unit when on a canoe trip through the backwoods in Ontario in 1997. It was much more expensive and less accurate back then. When the Bush Administration opened the larger military GPS network to public use, things changed in an instant.

My first GPS was an entire laptop sitting in the passenger seat with a card adaptor. Then I upgraded to a PDA (remember those?) with a card adaptor (may have been the same one, I can't remember). Motorcycled over 3000 miles with that setup before smart phones became a thing.

Yeah! My parents had a garmin or the like. Mother downloaded some voice pack for it, I forget who it was of. We still had papery maps with us, in case.

We bought one for a trip and it stopped working halfway through. Never got connection back. Fortunately we wrote down directions as backup.

Yes. We ended up lost on our hike while using it.

Second time was better, we were geocaching and were able to find quite a few if them. Although it might have been easier to find using points on a map with a compass.

Used GPS on boats as early as the late 1980’s, back when selective availability was still a thing. For those unfamiliar with it, GPS was initially military-only, and when they allowed civilian use they were concerned that US adversaries could use it for precision attacks. So SA was included in the civilian version, which introduced a random error of up to something like 1000 yards.

The truly ironic thing is that the US Coast Guard (a branch of the very military that created SA) saw the usefulness of GPS for marine navigation, but only if SA was removed. 1000 yards could easily mean the difference between a boat running aground (or worse) or not.

So the USCG built ground stations that would receive GPS signals, calculate the SA error, and broadcast a fixed signal. That was called Differential GPS, or DGPS. Boaters could buy special DGPS receivers for years, which were as accurate as GPS without the SA error.

Eventually the military was convinced to do away with SA entirely so DGPS was retired. It was only after that happened that GPS became globally useful for car, hiking, etc. navigation.

Visited the US for the first time on a work trip in 2013. The rental we got had a garmin gps included. Then I think it was around 2015-ish when I used Waze for the first time in my own car.

Yes, well I didn’t use it but my brother in law had one. It was a Trimble I think. I remember it was a big, heavy boxy thing. We used it when we were out in the desert probably around ‘92.

First time I ever used one was 2004 following the grateful dead on an east coast tour.

One nice benifit was we'd come into town from the opposite direction of the caravan, avoiding a ton of traffic and finding the back route to the venue. Almost always got us better parking and way shorter lines into the lot.

Yup.

Was playing Santa, going around to the patients of the home health company I worked for at the time. We were in the boss's car and she had a dedicated GPS device. Can't recall which brand.

But it's easy to get lost in the more remote sections of the tri-county area, even with GPS.

Before GPS became ubiquitous on phones, the grunt labor for home health had to rely on mapquest and such to get to the right area, and prayer to find a specific home.

There were some of us that knew the area well, and we'd get calls from the office asking for directions to places that weren't mapped right. And that would be while we were working, or even at weird hours.

I was one of the last people I knew to have a cell phone at all, largely because I refuse to be at anyone's beck and call. But the boss actually got a phone and paid me to carry it just for directions. We got along unusually well, but it was still a very aggressive negotiation on when I would answer the damn thing.

Anyway, yeah, that winter I played Santa the first time was the first time I used a GPS device. I was driving, and could have found most of the places without one, but it was nice to not have to be constantly on the lookout for that one tree that made a driveway almost invisible, or remember exactly which curve you'd come around and have to turn off a paved road that you could barely see even if the road had been straight.

I'm in the US but I bought a TomTom in 2008 instead of Garmin because at the time, their maps of Europe were better and we were still traveling there a lot.

One of my favorite memories was the time TomTom had us drive through someone's sheep pasture in Scotland. The day before we had driven a paved road that went through pastures, and online comments mentioned that the road was indeed open to the public and you had to get out, open the gate, drive through, then close the gate.

So when it said to do it again, I trusted it. But the road was not paved. It was rutted and muddy. We were in a sedan, not anything with adequate ground clearance. And we totally got stuck in the mud. It was very likely not a public road. I'm so glad the farmer who owned it didn't come out to yell at us. I rocked the car enough to get us unstuck. We came out the other side of the field, back onto pavement, and I didn't let TomTom try to send us offroading again!

This TomTom also struggled with extreme northern latitudes. Wherever we went in Alaksa, it assumed we were about 100 yards off to the side of the road, sometimes out in the middle of Turnagain Arm 🤣, and constantly fussed at us to navigate back to the marked path.

Yes, palm pilot or whatever that thing was called. It worked pretty well.

Yeah it was a USB dongle, I think Garmin made it, and it was a huge pain to set up. Power inverter into the car charger, laptop into the power inverter, Garmin dongle into the laptop, load up the software and wait like 10 minutes for it to triangulate itself with glonass or whatever other satellite options were in there. After that it worked pretty well, but most of the time I could get to where I wanted to go before it could figure out where I was.

The original Droid was the first one I had that really impressed me, basically because of how much nicer it was than that previous experience. Now I just had to pull out my phone and launch the app, and it was accurate to within a few feet instead of a few meters! Still took them a few years to update Google maps with a lot of the new subdivisions in the area, but for a novelty navigator it was pretty cool.

I remember being really amazed that I could stand in place and turn around and see my arrow on google maps turn with me. It seemed crazy it had that much precision.

I bought a garmin specifically to help me navigate moving on my own halfway across the USA. It was my first time moving out. It was my first time on such a long drive by myself. Lots of firsts. (I actually forgot my phone back home, since the garmin was its own device, I was more focused on having that than my cheap ass phone. Wound up pulling into a Walmart to buy a Tracfone lol)

Prior to that I used MapQuest a lot

I had one of the first affordable hand held GPS units made by Magellan in the mid 90's. I was doing monthly backpacking trips so it seemed like a good purchase. Soon went back to a map and compass and never went back