FIGURE D

Before calculating a route to your destination, confirm the start address that the PNA displays at the top of the screen by pressing the Enter key. Click picture for a larger image.

Due to an intentional error factor put into the civilian GPS signal by the United States Department of Defense (we don't want our enemies making weapons that can be used against us from easily obtainable civilian GPS receivers), the PNA may occasionally determine that your start address is located on a different street than your actual location. No problem. If your start address isn't on the street listed at the top of the screen, you can select a nearby street from the list of streets on the screen, then press the Enter key to ensure the calculation of an accurate route. The PNA then automatically calculates turn-by-turn instructions to your destination.

If you don't know the exact destination address, you can use the "Places to Go" feature shown in Figure E and choose from a list of over 40 different categories of places to drive to -- including banks, ATM machines, restaurants, hospitals, police stations, auto repair shops, shopping malls, business establishments, hotels, and post offices. With the PNA, you can look up all locations within a category by city or find the nearest location within five miles. This is by far one of the device's coolest features.

FIGURE E

If you don't know the exact destination address, you can use the "Places to Go" feature and choose from a list of over 40 different categories. Click picture for a larger image.

I used this capability recently to navigate from my house to an obscure Spanish restaurant that I was told to go to on the recommendation of a friendly waiter. The restaurant is located in the heart of Newark, New Jersey's Ironbound district, by far one of the most complicated urban areas in the country, with lots of badly-lit, narrow one-way streets. Newark is also a fairly high-crime area, so it's not exactly the kind of place you want to get lost in, either. All I knew was that the restaurant was in Newark, and I knew the name of the place, Casa Vasca. While I could've looked Casa Vasca's address up in the phone book and had the PNA route me to it that way, sure enough, the restaurant was listed in the PNA's database when I pulled up Newark and I selected it from the list of restaurants.

The PNA gets its address and location information from a database supplied by NavTech (http://www.navtech.com/), the leading supplier of map, address, and highway data to places like MapBlast and to the various auto navigation system vendors. You can see how the map is broken down in Figure F, and if you take a look at the Datus Inc. Web site at: http://www.datusinc.com/metro.html you'll see exactly how this map works.

FIGURE F

PNA breaks the US into continental US into 9 mapping regions. Click picture for a larger image.

The information that NavTech supplies is refreshed on a quarterly basis -- this way the PNA can always remain current. Right now, NavTech has map information for most of the major cities in the continental United States, as well as certain parts of Canada. If you try to use your PNA in Alaska or Hawaii, however, you're out of luck.