How easy is it to use?

The Electronic compass???????is truly a hand-held machine (about the size and weight of a mobile phone) with an attractive ergonomic case, designed to withstand some of the rigours of outdoor use (the unit is waterproof but not submersible). Much of the weight of the unit is due to the six AA batteries used to power the GPS receiver and the liquid crystal display. Despite the fact that the LCD is very clear and bright, it is the GPS receiver which consumes most of the power. Silva has taken a minimalist approach to designing the keypad which has a choice of only seven large, friendly buttons to press.

The operation of the compass is menu driven with four of the buttons assigned to scrolling through the menu options and the fifth 'key' used to lock and unlock the commands and waypoints for adjustment and setting. The arrow keys are also used to scroll through numbers and letters when entering waypoints directly. While this design is very pleasing to the eye it does make operating the compass slightly tiresome and relatively difficult to do freely without a reasonable degree of familiarity with the menu layout. Familiarity comes quickly, fortunately, with a couple of days of practise. Although the built-in compass is too unwieldy for use as a conventional compass - either for sighting or taking bearings directly from the map - its presence helps make the Silva GPS a powerful navigational aid when locating waypoints. In the unit we were provided, the batteries were exhausted very quickly in continuous navigation mode, lasting only a few hours. Silva claim that the latest model sustains much longer use - up to twelve hours. When not in continuous navigation mode a single position fix takes about one minute, though the first fix in a new region will take longer, as will fixes performed when reception is poor, such as in bad weather or in forests.

Like: Gyroscope(???), Level(), Angle sensor(????), Accelerometer(??????)and Angle sensor(?????).