I dunno where they get em or what brand most of the truckers in the USA
use but  they are big screen and seem easy to see the screen.  I had a
chance, just last fall, to glance across from my Vanagon, which was up on
the back of one of those flat bed car haulers trucks and looked right into
the cabs of quite a few Over the highway big rigs as we passed em.  I
noticed many of them had big ole GPS screens mounted at eye level in the
cab...This was right out side of LA..With a huge tractor trailer rig and the
need to go into a city like LA to deliver a load, a GPS with a very good
street map program really makes sense.
  Now I don't know how this might work either, but a pal navigates with his
Smart Phone  or Ipod or Iphone or whatever it is, somehow.  He showed me one
time, and it seemed pretty cool..
  Me, I still use paper maps for travel and Topo Atlas' for finding
backroads and fun places..Mainly I like to look out through my van windows
as I travel rather than in at a screen while I try to learn to use a new
electronic time saver..
  Don Hanson

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Andrew Grebneff <goose1047@gmail.com>wrote:

> I guess it depends what you want from a GPS.
>
> My own needs would dictate a handheld with Macintosh compatibility
> that can take uploads from chips.
>
> I wouldn't really need it for navigation, as I almost never visit a
> city where I'd need one (Wellington or Auckland), but more for getting
> gridreferences for fossil localities (lat-long format sucks). For this
> I'd need both the universal transverse mercator grid and the New
> Zealand grid... meaning I'd need a $400-or-so purchase of map
> software, which equals the purchase cost of a top-of-the-line Garmin
> GPSMAP60. That doesn't make sense to me, hence my refusal to buy one.
> And if I wanted to use it on a visit to say Australia, Canada or the
> US I'd have to buy the software for those countries in addition.
>
> The screen on these is far too small for car navigation... you can't
> mess with magnification etc on the go, you'll have an accident. I
> guess you COULD get an electronics whiz to make an interface to
> connect the thing to a big dash-mounted monitor (Apple 24"?), but what
> would that cost?
>