To successfully search for mushrooms in unknown places, you may need satellite navigation. Presently, the technical level of GPS navigation devices will allow you to determine very precisely your location even in bad weather and in conditions of dense forest ranges. At the same time in the navigator can be both vector maps and raster satellite imagery of the necessary terrain.
What should be the navigator for the mushroom hunting? All of the following is based on my own experience.
1. Of course, this is a good reception. The navigator should perfectly catch a signal in a dense forest, this will allow you to accurately go to the previously marked tags. The worst reception conditions for a navigator are mountainous terrain covered with forests, for example, in conditions of the Carpathian mountains beyond the limits of the accuracy of a good navigator can fall to 15-20 meters at the best 3 meters and an inexpensive navigator with poor reception and accuracy will allow you at least not to catch fornication (not get lost).
2. Good or complete waterproofing. The waterproof navigator allows being positioned normally even under heavy rain.
3. Ability to load raster satellite images in the navigator. In my opinion, this is a very necessary thing for mushroom pickers. On the ground, you can always find out where a forest is, where a clearing or dredging and continue the path to the mushrooms. (For me, the author of the article, this was the most important factor on a par with moisture protection and accuracy). To display bitmap images, it is desirable to have a large screen resolution, but even on Garmin Dakota, which has a fairly small screen, you can quite successfully navigate. Naturally, the navigator must have enough memory to load such pictures.
This is what a raster satellite image looks like on the Garmin Oregon 450 navigator available on the BirdsEye subscription. According to this picture, everything is perfectly visible, where there are glades, possible brooks and, of course, potential mushroom places. Next is a raster image with already mushroomed marks.
4. Ability to set labels, waypoints, and record and display tracks, but it can probably all navigators. By displaying the current track, you can see which part of the forest has not yet been traversed.
5. The operating time is not less than 10 hours, otherwise, additional sets of batteries or batteries will be required. Although it all depends on the time of your stay in search of mushrooms.
This, perhaps, the main parameters (and in some sense even ideal), which, in my opinion, should have a navigator for mushroom hunting. And the choice of the navigator will be left for you since now many navigators of different manufacturers correspond to the above-stated parameters. As an example, we will name several models, these are navigators of Garmin series Oregon, Dakota, eTrex, Magellan series eXplorist, Triton and some Lowrance models.
GPS navigator based on the communicator or PDA (which also can be downloaded satellite images) can only be considered as a budget option since it does not provide the required accuracy or protection from the weather.
PS: The bonus for mushroom pickers that use Garmin navigators there are two pictures in the form of a white mushroom (small and large), which is convenient to use as a symbol of the waypoint for a place with mushrooms. Download the .rar archive, unzip and save it in the required folder, for the Garmin Oregon, Dakota, Montana navigators, the path is the \ Garmin \ CustomSymbols folder.
