Review of Delorme Street Atlas & Earthmate LT-20 GPS

This product by Delorme is an excellent product. The cost is only $99 and includes all the street maps for the United States and a USB GPS receiver. It can be installed on almost any Windows laptop computer. The autorouting function works well. After an hour or so of playing you can be an expert at using the product. We deliberately went off course to check out how the software would react and it always detects that we took a wrong turn and rerouted us. It has voice synthesis built-in that works fairly well. We selected the Microsoft Mary voice and it really personifies the program. The built-in speakers of our IBM Thinkpad are a little scratchy so sometimes it is hard to tell exactly what Mary has to say. She usually gives you a heads up about 1-1/2 minutes before you need to make a turn. The display also lets you know when to turn, but it is recommended that you only go by the voice if alone in the car for safety reasons. The software also has voice recognition built-in, but we have not been successful in using it without a headset with built-in microphone. When out geocaching we highly recommend this inexpensive program to autoroute you from cache to cache. It can make a few mistakes because it routes you to the nearest road, but in New England that is usually good enough.