May 31, 1999 Magellan GPS 315A |
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The tiny, ultra-low-price Magellan 315A is the first new handheld GPS in the aviation marketplace in more than a year, and the first to break the $300 price barrier. AVweb's Mike Busch put the 315A through its paces and found it to possess an interesting contrast of striking strengths and serious shortcomings. Read Mike's in-depth review to learn whether or not this is the right unit for you.
May 31, 1999
 The handheld GPS market has been eerily quiet lately.
During 1996 and 1997, it seemed as if a new aviation handheld was being announced every
few months, as manufacturers jockied for position to out-feature and under-price the
competition. But Sun 'n Fun 1998 saw only one new product announcement in this
category: the Lowrance AirMap 100. During the year that
followed, there was really nothing new to report — unless you stretch the definition of
"handheld" to include kneeboard-sized units like the SkyForce IIIc and the
Magellan EC-20X.
 Finally, however, there's a new entrant in the aviation handheld
field. Magellan just started shipping its new GPS 315A, a tiny, low-end unit that is the
first under-$300 unit we've seen that contains an aviation database. My first reaction was
"Wow. At that price, this should sell like hotcakes...if it's any good, that
is."
After putting the little 315A through its paces, I came away with decidedly mixed
feelings. I found the little Magellan to possess a combination of astonishingly good
capabilities and fairly serious shortcomings. It's as if Magellan decided to create an
aviation version of their GPS 315/320 terrestrial/marine handheld, but stopped before
quite finishing the job.
Mighty Slick Hardware
 I found the hardware platform of the Magellan GPS 315 quite impressive. At first, the
tiny 6.2" x 2.0" x 1.3" size of the unit — smallest I've ever seen — was
off-putting, provoking thoughts like "is this a toy?" and "is this really
usable for someone like me with middle-aged eyes and middle-aged fingers?" Its
amazingly light weight (7 oz.) reinforced that first impression. But after using it for
awhile, I quickly changed my tune.
The display is huge compared to the overall size of the unit. It's razor-sharp, with
excellent resolution and good grayscale capability. I had absolutely no problems reading
it, and in fact liked it a whole lot better than the far-larger Magellan Skystar.
The keyboard is small but very user-friendly. Frankly, it looks as if the design was
copied directly from the Garmin GPS 92, except that Magellan wisely put the keyboard below
the display where God intended it. (Garmin insists on putting its keyboards above the
display, so that your hand obscures the display when entering data.)
The unit is powered by a pair of AA alkaline
batteries. Magellan claims "up to 15 hours" of battery life, and my tests
confirmed that this figure is no exaggeration. They could probably achieve even longer
times if the unit had a battery-saver mode that reduced the rate of GPS updates, but so
far as I could determine the software is hard-coded to a one-second update rate.
 But in my view, the most impressive part of the hardware, by far, is its
12-parallel-channel GPS receiver. The tiny Magellan has without doubt the most sensitive
GPS engine I've ever tested. It acquires an initial position fix very quickly under
unbelievably adverse reception conditions, and then hangs on for dear life.
As I type this article, the 315 is sitting here next to me, locked onto four satellites
while inside my computer lab with no decent view of the sky and surrounded by
equipment generating horrendous radio-frequency interference. I've never seen
another GPS that could do this! During automotive tests, the darn thing never hiccupped
when I drove under bridges and freeway overpasses, and would maintain lock even lying on
the floor of the car and surrounded by metal on almost all sides.
Folks, I've tested a lot of GPS portables, and the 315's receiver is nothing short of
magic!
Do-It-Yourself Database On CD-ROM
 When you buy a Magellan GPS 315A (for "aviation"), what
you get is a regular GPS 315 terrestrial unit plus a DataSend CD-ROM and a data cable.
(More about the cable later.) As it comes from the box, the GPS 315 knows nothing about
aviation. But the CD-ROM contains a worldwide Jeppesen aviation database, as well as a
North American recreational database. It also contains the DataSend software that runs
under Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0 and allows you to upload a customized set of fixes
(Magellan calls them "Points Of Interest" or POIs) into the unit.
 The DataSend software
installs just like any other 32-bit Windows application. Before launching the application,
you need to mount the CD-ROM in your drive and connect the GPS 315 to one of the serial
ports on your PC by means of the included data cable.
Using the software is a very easy three-step process. First, a world map appears on the
screen. Using the "Select Region" tool from the toolbar, you drag a rectangle
over the part of the world that you want the GPS to know about (e.g., the western U.S.).
Next, using the "Select POIs" button, you open a dialog box that lists the
various categories of aviation and non-aviation POIs in the database and check the ones
you want to load into the GPS.
 Here's where it gets a
little tricky. The GPS 315 has room for about 20,000 POIs. The larger the region you
select and the more categories of POIs you ask for within that region, the more of this
"POI budget" you consume. At the bottom of the "Select POIs" dialog is
a status line that shows you how many POIs you have selected and how many more will still
fit before you exceed the maximum size.
I found that if I was willing to forgo intersections, I could easily load all the
airports and navaids in North America — plus a lot of other stuff like Major Cities,
Large Cities, and Small Cities — with lots of room to spare. However, there are more than
20,000 intersections in the continental U.S. alone, more than the total capacity of the
GPS 315. By trial and error, I determined that I could define a rectangular region
consisting of the western two-thirds of the continental U.S. — basically everything west
of the Mississippi River — and include all airports, navaids, intersections and cities
within that region while coming in just under the maximum limit. Obviously, all sorts of
other regions could be defined to meet the same criterion.
Finally, you click the "Upload" button which transfers your customized
database into the GPS 315 via the data cable. This process can take 10 or 15 minutes.
This is actually a pretty good scheme, allowing you to custom-design the database to
meet your needs. For example, next week I depart on a long trip from California to Key
West, Florida, and then over the top of Cuba to Grand Cayman Island. With the DataSend
software, it's a simple matter for me to define a region that includes the southern U.S.,
Cuba, and the Cayman Islands.
Intuitive User Interface
Whenever I review any new avionics item, my acid test of the user interface is a simple
one: Can I figure out how to use all the features without referring to the manual? By that
standard, the Magellan GPS 315 gets reasonably high marks.
As you can see, the unit has a series of eight navigation pages. You sequence from one
to the next by depressing the "NAV" key. (You can also back up by pressing the
"QUIT" key.) If you don't care to see one or more of these nav pages — say, the
highway or odometer pages — you can configure the unit to remove them from the rotation.
The alphanumeric fields on most of the nav pages may be customized; the factory-default
layouts are shown above.
 No attempt has been made to hide the fact that the GPS 315 was
originally designed for terrestrial and nautical use, not for aviation. The unit uses
decidedly terrestrial/nautical terminology, such as Course Over Ground (COG) and Speed
Over Ground (SOG) instead of "track" and "groundspeed." My favorite
example is "MOB" (which stands for "Man Overboard") that is used to
denote a user waypoint defined at your present position. The highway, speedometer and
odometer graphics are also giveaways. But there's nothing here you can't get used to
quickly, and the important stuff is configurable: distances in nautical miles, speeds in
knots, and directions in magnetic.
Pressing the "MENU" key brings up a context-sensitive menu. For example, if
you're on the speedometer/odometer page when you press "MENU," then the menu
includes a "Reset Trip Odometer" function. Likewise, if you're on a nav page
that includes customizable fields, a "Customize" menu entry appears.
 It's pretty logical. And, oh, by the way, the GPS 315 user manual is one of
the best I've seen.
No matter what page you're on, the menu always contains items for Waypoints, Routes,
and Setup. (I'm not sure why they call 'em "waypoints" in the GPS 315 but
"POIs" in the DataSend software.)
Waypoints allows you to search for specific waypoints (airports, navaids, etc.) and to
retrieve information about those waypoints. For airports, for instance, the database
contains lat/long, tower and ATIS frequencies, field elevation, and bearing/distance from
your present position. You can create user-defined waypoints by specifying coordinates or
a radial and distance from another waypoint.
Routes invokes a rudimentary capability for defining and storing multi-leg routes. The
box can store up to 20 routes of 30 legs each. Route fixes may be waypoints of any
category. Routes may be edited by appending, inserting or deleting legs or changing
waypoints. However, there's no easy way to skip one or more route waypoints, or to start
navigating a stored route at some intermediate waypoint.
Setup allows you to initialize the GPS receiver, supress any of the eight predefined
nav screens, choose the desired coordinate system, map datum, time format, nav units and
north reference (true or magnetic). It also permits you to customize the backlight timer,
the beeper, and the serial output format and baud rate, and to put the unit in simulator
mode.
In addition, the GPS 315 has a nice "Sun/Moon" feature that calculates
sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset times, plus the phase of the moon. That could be
useful for night flying. It also has a screen that claims to predict the best times of day
for hunting and fishing, but since I do neither, I'll take the Fifth on that one.
So Where's The Beef?
 As you can see, the Magellan GPS 315A offers a very promising
foundation for a low-end aviation handheld. Unfortunately, it falls short in several
significant respects. Here's a list of the things I found most disappointing:
- The unit does not display special-use airspace. I'd have to consider
this a very serious shortcoming in an aviation GPS, particularly for VFR use.
- There's no provision for connecting a remote-mounted antenna. For any
other handheld, I'd consider that to be a deal-breaker. The GPS 315 has such a hot GPS
engine that it's actually useable without a remote antenna, but I still think this is a
serious flaw.
- There's no yoke mount. However, the GPS 315 is so small and light that
a couple of strategically-placed Velcro patches would probably be adequate.
- The DC power cable is a mess. The GPS 315A comes standard with a
combination DC power and RS232 data cable, which is essentially a "Y" cable (see
photo). If you want to power the unit from aircraft power, you attach one end to the GPS
and plug the other end into the plane's cigarette lighter socket. But that still leaves
the "third end" with DB9F data connector flopping around the cockpit. I suspect
that if I owned one of these, I'd probably wind up buying an extra power/data cable and
lopping off the data portion.
- There are no fancy aviation features. No HSI screen, no runway
diagrams, no runway centerline extensions, no approaches, no VNAV, etc. This is very much
a terrestrial/marine GPS to which a database of aviation fixes has been added.
- There is no ground mapping. I don't mean just no highways, rivers or
railroad tracks. The map display contains no coastlines, no state or national boundaries
— nothing but waypoint icons and identifiers. Given the high-resolution grayscale-capable
display, that really seems a shame.
- There is no provision for rechargable batteries. You can certainly use
AA-sized NiCd or NiMH batteries in the unit (although they won't last as long as
alkalines), but there's no way to recharge them in-flight.
Recommendation
So...is the Magellan GPS 315A worth considering? In my
view, that depends on what you plan to do with it.
 To be honest, I can't imagine buying this unit as my primary GPS
navigator. The lack of special-use airspace depiction and remote-mounted antenna support
are limitations that I simply could not accept. Sure, the receiver is probably sensitive
enough that the built-in antenna would provide adequate reception most of the time. And
sure, SUA is depicted on my paper charts. But for another $150 or so, I'd probably opt for
a Garmin GPS 92 which has those features, and I might even go $50 more for a Lowrance
AirMap 100 and get ground mapping capability, too.
On the other hand, it strikes me that the Magellan GPS 315A might be just the ticket
for a the pilot who flies behind a panel-mount GPS and is looking for a low-cost handheld
as backup. Such a unit would spend most (ideally all) of its life powered off in your
flight bag, glovebox, or seatback pocket waiting for the panel mount GPS or electrical
system to croak...something that probably won't happen. Does it make sense to spend $500
on such a backup device when a $300 model will do the trick? As more and more of our
aircraft become panel-mount-GPS-equipped, I think there's more and more of a role for a
low-cost device like this.
At the same time, it seems to me that it wouldn't be terribly hard for Magellan to
address the shortcomings of this unit for aviation use — notably, the lack of SUA and a
remote antenna jack — and turn it into a real contender. If they did that, and kept the
price around $300, I imagine the aviation world would beat a path to their door.
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