Sick of packing around 2 lbs of bigger-than-a-breadbox PLGR? Monochromatic DAGR display making you long for your color Garmin ETrex? Jonesing for that touch-screen interface of your iPhone or Garmin Oregon? Well wait no more, warfighters, for Rockwell Collins has answered your prayers with the 'MicroDAGR'!
Supposedly far smaller than the DAGR, this unit features color display, touchscreen interface, compact form factor allowing wear on a lanyard or even your wrist -- and best of all, while still being as small or smaller than those illicit commercial GPS receivers that get snuck out into the field -- MicroDAGR (when keyed) still has all the anti-spoofing secure GPS reception of its bigger (DAGR) and older (PLGR) brothers.
Hopefully, once fielded in numbers, the use of non-secure civilian GPS in what might turn out to be life or death situations will diminish to zip as the "but Sarge...the issue stuff is just too **** big and heavy..." excuse becomes a lie.
RWC's press-release is a little vague (why specifically mention L1 ??) and there's no word whether it will still interface to the various Situational Awareness (SA) systems etc. out there -- but for the individual soldier-level deployment it seems like they not only narrowed the gap between military and civilian equipment but leaped a decent bound beyond it. I'd like to try one in some real-world environments before I get too excited about it, but until then...good job, Rockwell-Collins!
It's neat, I played with one a few weeks ago. The only problem is it's SO small, someones gonna loose it easy, in my opinion..... Yes, it does SA, and a ton of other stuff that the DAGR doesnt do....
Yeah, and Polaris is a big waste of money. You're paying for the name. It doesn't do anything a new Garmin or Magellan won't do. For that matter, my iPhone does 90% of it, plus 75,000 other programs.
Not only that - but everything including the manual for it is extra! Six months lead time from order to delivery -- comes in a plain white cardboard box with no literature whatsoever -- and you have to spend even more and more on all the maps etc. just to make it remotely useful. For 2 large..plus..plus..plus??
Also, the DAGR is L1/L2 where the Polaris is L1 only (not that civvy users would use L2 as it is presently anyway, but still...) DAGR accessories all work, but unless you specify the part number for the DAGR mount rather than the Polaris mount, you'll get a black one rather than a green one. Why bother having two in the system especially given the number of likely Polaris buyers? Only God knows. (Great page on DAGR and Polaris here: www.prc68.com/I/DAGR.shtml )
I too hope that RWC releases a civvy version of MiniDAGR because their stuff really is top-notch for the most part, and I'm really sick of the hi-end but low quality civvy street stuff out there at the moment from outfits who have the resources to 'get it right' but don't bother to try (yet still charge the big ticket...yes, Garmin - I'm looking at your crap under-canopy performance and through-a-glass-darkly screen for $550 bucks and change. *cough*)
New Military GPS by 2010
