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St Davids to Bangor Equipment page |
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Obviously you will need all normal walking equipment: waterproof
outer shell, warm inner clothes, a good pair of boots, a rucksack, suitable maps, a waterproof map case,
a compass or GPS or, if you can afford it, a Road Angel or equivalent - see below The notes which follow deal with special equipment
particularly relevant to this terrain:
You will need the following sheets::
These cover the whole walk from South to North.
They may be obtained on the web or from any reputable bookshop.
A basic eTrex has NO BUILT-IN MAPS but can be held in the hand and, like the familiar car gps, uses the 24 American direction-satellites 11000 miles above the surface of the earth to fix your position to within about 5 metres. It gives an instant grid reference for your present position and, as you walk, will show you the current direction to any point whose grid reference has been previously keyed in. (It will remember these points, even when switched off) If you are a good navigator it will probably never save your life but it will save time and remove uncertainty in forest and on featureless high ground in cloud. If you want built-in maps, don't buy a more expensive Garmin. You should go for a device which allows you to see proper 25000 OS maps and the choice is still fairly limited. Memory-Map offer a splendid range of maps and include a custom arrangement which allows you to define precisely the area you want to cover. Their website offers the Road Angel Adventurer, a light, waterproof device which will display these maps and show your position like the device used in a car. The Road Angel has two modes of operation, either in the car with the usual, mildly irritating, verbal instructions, or when walking, in which case the 25000 maps are displayed. In this second mode it thankfully does not talk to you. (Click Here for information about the Road Angel and here for information (near the bottom of a very long page) about custom maps. You can make a custom strip-map of the whole of this walk for £83 and the Adventurer will cost you £250 including maps of all the National Parks at 50000. Against this consider your potential saving of £50 or so in paper maps. A word of warning: The Road Angel works fine straight out of the box with 50000 maps of all the National Parks but using the state-of-the-art facilities for buying sections of the 25000 maps on-line needs some patience as the technology is developing so fast that the documentation is, at the time of writing (Summer 2009) lagging behind the software. There is also a limit on the length of time the built-in re-chargable battery will run (about 7 hours if you use power-saving settings) although a back-up pack can be easily obtained from just mobile
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