Budget GPS Unit Hits The UK

Over the past few years GPS units have been getting more and more affordable and another low price mark looks like being set with the arrival of the new Lowrance iFinder Go, which is being brought into the UK by Swedish navigation specialists Silva.

The iFinder Go has a suggested retail price of £89.95, which, if other GPS units are anything to go by, means you may well be able to find it for less and is produced by established US company Lorance Electronics.

So what are you getting for your 90-odd quid? It's a compact unit that weighs almost exactly the same as a Garmin eTrex at 164 grammes with two AA batteries, although it's about an inch longer. Specs include a 16 parallel channel GPS and WAAS receiver, built-in 32 MB of memory, rather uselessly preloaded with a background map of the US. It also has the capacity to store up to 1000 waypoints and 100 routes and up to 100 retraceable plot trails.

The unit is waterproof up to IPX7 standard, whatever that is, and battery life from the two AAs is claimed to be over 48 hours. Oh, and it's bright yellow.

The unit comes in 'Easy Mode', but it's straightforward to set it to 'Advanced Mode' which includes to ability to plot positions using the British grid, enables com ports, so you can communicate with your PC and allows you to use 'Advanced Waypoints' whatever they are. You can find the full specs on the Lowrance web site.

Initial impressions are that the unit seems a little less intuitive in use than, say, an eTrex, but that like all GPS units, to achieve anything like their full potential, they need to be used in conjunction with a computer and some form of mapping software.

Right now we're unsure of whether the iFinder Go is compatible with Tracklogs, Memory Map or Anquet systems, however we'll get the unit properly tested and let you know.