The Software

The Ostia software displays maps, shows your current position and calculates routes. Generally the procedure for taking a trip is as follows:

1. Set everything up and enable the GPS receiver.


2. Wait for the receiver to acquire your position. This can take as little as 2 seconds if the receiver has not been moved significantly since it was last turned on, or it can take several minutes with marginal satellite reception or if the receiver was moved several hundred kilometres from where it was used last. This initialization is common to all GPS devices. I find this device initializes quicker than a handheld Garmin unit I have.


3. Load the appropriate map section(s) for origin and destination. You also need to load any map sections in between your origin and your destination. Your position will then be plotted on the map using a highly visible large red chevron. The tip of the chevron points in the direction of travel. Note that GPS technology cannot determine the compass facing of a stationary object - you have to be moving for the chevron to be pointed in the right direction. The centre of the chevron pinpoints your location.
4. Find your destination through several means:
• Address lookup - the map contains a database of all streets, street numbers and place names


• Address lookup off the Windows Mobile contact list


• Recent destination


• A list of GPS favourites you have entered previously


• Street intersection


• Point of interest off the map database (i.e. airport, zoo, science centre, etc.)
The map databases of all loaded maps are merged, allowing lookup off any of them without having to specify which map section to examine.

5. After your destination is determined, Ostia calculates a route. It can do this in several ways: fastest, based on posted speed limits, shortest, based on shortest distance, and no highway.


6. Drive! Ostia continuously updates where you are on the map, your next maneuver, the distance to your next maneuver, the distance remaining to the destination and the estimated time of arrival to the destination. Note the distances are in actual road mileage, not "as the crow flies". You do not have to take your eyes off the road as a voice prompt will give you about 45 seconds warning when you approach your next turn. 5-10 seconds before the turn, a bell sound will give you a second prompt. The voice will also warn you when you have strayed off route - in which case, it can automatically make a new route to your destination based on your current location.

About Maps

Pharos has divided the country up into many individual map sections. The intention is to have map divisions determined by political boundaries (i.e. one map for each province for my Canadian map version). However, in densely populated areas with many roads, maps are broken up into approximately 20 MB chunks to make them more manageable by the software. This means some maps can cover extremely large geographical areas, the entire province of Manitoba, for example, or a much smaller area with many more roads, like Toronto and Southwestern Ontario.

To load the maps onto the PocketPC, Ostia provides a PC-based tool called MapFinder:


Fig 3. Canadian Map Divided into Sections

The colours give you an idea how the country is divided up into map sections, and what a single map section can cover. A map's data size is determined by its amount of roads and place names, not its area. The huge northern portion covers the Yukon Territory, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, a land mass approaching the size of Europe, yet with so little roads so far north, the map is only 5.9 MB. The country's most populous region, Toronto and Southwestern Ontario, is one of the smallest map sections by land mass yet has 21.5 MB of data.

This also gives you an idea how much storage space you need. With only 32 MB of internal memory, my PocketPC would not be able to store all its programs and the 21.5 MB that just a single map section may consume. So I have a 512 MB SD card which could easily store the entire country with space left over for MP3s. However I usually only have 3 or 4 of the most recent map sections I've used loaded onto the storage card.

These map sections are stored on the Pharos Map CD. You can extract them all to your hard drive, but to copy them to your PocketPC you select the MS-ActiveSynch or CF-Card reader options on the upper right. This control sets the transfer method used for copying the map section to the device. MS ActiveSynch is the Microsoft PocketPC communication software. MapFinder would then use this software and the PC-PocketPC USB synch cable to transfer files. This is a very slow method which can take several minutes for the larger map sections. The card reader option is much faster.

In most situations, it is obvious which map sections you need. However if you only know the city name, you can type it into the search area on the upper left. The software searches the maps for the city and based on the radio buttons on the upper left, will display either the map section the city is located in or the map section and a box the specified distance around the city. By double-clicking on the found map section, it gets selected and can be transferred.