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One of my favorite gadgets to use while trail riding is a GPS Receiver. I have owned the following receivers:

• Magellan GPS 315
• Magellan Meridian
• Magellan Meridian Platinum
• DeLorme PN-20
• DeLorme PN-40

In fact, my infatuation with GPS has earned me the position of GPS Training Instructor for our annual Crook County Search and Rescue Academy.

I am also very active on the DeLorme Forums as HorseTrailRider.

Magellan GPS 315

This receiver introduced me to the world of GPS. Basically told me my position and displayed a breadcrumb trail of where I'd been on a blank screen. No aerial imagery, no road information, no routing.

While you should never only rely on a GPS receiver while in the great outdoors, they are never-the-less a great comfort to have.

While horse camping, my wife and I went on a late afternoon ride with our friend's granddaughter, who was a novice rider. After riding for some time, I realized it was starting to get dark. A decision had to be made. Do we ride forward toward camp into an area we hadn't ridden before, or do we backtrack.

If we backtracked, it would definitely be dark before reaching camp (and of course we didn't take a flashlight). The thought of riding in the pitch black with a novice rider wasn't something I was looking forward too.

But, if we ride forward toward camp into an area we hadn't ridden before, what would/could we run into? We might end up needing to turn around and backtracking anyway.

Before deciding what to do, I happen to look at the breadcrumb trail on the 315. This is when I noticed we are only 500 ft from the trail we had taken from camp (basically we had circled around some hills). I know if we could make the 500 ft to our previous trail, we would make it back to camp before our friends called Search and Rescue to come find us.

We decided 500 ft was better than backtracking several miles and better than riding staight toward camp. And while the 500 ft wasn't going to be the easiest for a novice rider (steep with lots of downed trees), it was only 500 ft! Less than 2 football fields.

After picking our way through the downed trees, we made it back to our previous trail and got back to camp just before it started getting really dark. Without the breadcrumb trail showing on the GPS, we wouldn't have known just how close we were to a known trail back to camp. Chances are, we would have continued on into an unknown area, not knowing for sure we could have made it. That experience made me realize just how valuable a GPS can be.

Magellan Meridian & Magellan Meridian Platinum

After the GPS 315, I purchased the Magellan Meridian and then the Meridian Platinum. The Platinum added an electronic compass and barometric sensor to the basic Meridian. The Platinum also increased the basemap memory from 2MB to 16MB.

One of the best features of the Meridian series is the fact that it's a mapping GPS. This means that instead of having a blank screen with nothing but my breadcrumb trail, this model could also display roads, rivers, lakes, trails, and contour lines. This allowed you to see what was around you. It placed a topographical road map inside the GPS!

Not only that, but the Meridain allowed road routing. Pick a destination, hit calculate, and the Meridain would select the roads to get you there. Not always the best roads, but it did create a route to get you to your destination.

I used my Meridian's on many, many miles of trails.

DeLorme PN-20

In early 2007, DeLorme introduced the PN-20. The biggest selling points of the PN-20 is:

With the Magellan Meridian, I used the DeLorme Topo USA software to download and display my track logs. With the PN-20, I could also download the Topo USA maps into the GPS. Additionally I could download imagery using the NetLink tab of Topo USA and then load the imagery into the PN-20. This was very cool!

But what I found really cool was the ability to download any digital map into the PN-20 by using DeLorme's XMap Pro software.

Here in Oregon, we have District Ranger maps (sometimes called fire maps). They are paper maps 36" wide and anywhere from 40 to 60 inches long. And they show just about every logging road ever created.

I take the paper map down to Kinko's and have it scanned on their 36" wide scanner at 300DPI. I then use XMap Pro to geo-reference the image and to create a map file that I can download into the PN-20. Here is how they appear on the PN-20:

And as an added bonus, I can download the track logs of all our past trail rides and have them overlaid on any of the maps:

And of course the PN-20 does road routing. And while it does get your from Point A to Point B, I found that most times you could drive from Point A to Point B faster than it could calculate the route! This was one of it's weakest features.

While this GPS has awesome mapping features, it's processor was way to under powered to handle the tasks of routing and map drawing.

DeLorme PN-40

In late 2008, DeLorme introduced their next GPS receiver in the PN-xx series, the PN-40. This model added an electronic compass, barometric sensor, more internal flash, and most importantly - a much faster processor.

The processing power of the PN-40 allowed routes to be calculated in seconds, not minutes. Raster based maps are also drawn in seconds, not minutes. Everything about the PN-40 is fast when compared to the original PN-20.

The PN-40 is what the PN-20 should have been!