Garmin Etrex Legend GPS Receiver
by Garmin
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List Price: Our Price: $197.87 You Save: $2.12 (1%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $50.00 (click here) Category: GPS or Navigation System See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Garmin Etrex Legend GPS Receiver
Customer Review: Great Basic GPS for Historical & Genealogical Research
Summary: 5 Stars
Great Basic GPS for Historical & Genealogical Research
One of the strengths of GPS technology is the myriad uses of a hand held GPS device, ranging from hiking, mountain biking, kayaking, camping, and a host of other outdoor applications. Many hunters and fishermen also enjoy the many features of a good GPS device. I have even used my device to report nesting pairs of eagles and pollution sites.
While I also use my device for these other activities, I also use my GPS frequently in my historical and genealogical research. Selected examples include reporting (or finding) the precise location of a gravestone of interest in a very large cemetery; accurately reporting locations of gravestones or small family cemeteries that are located well off the road and in some cases completed overgrown with thick brush and coverage; using waypoint features to pin the boundaries of very early deeds or historic locations; doing field surveys of historic or family sites; translating historic locations back and forth between maps, aerial photographs, and actual boots-on-the-ground field surveys, and many similar applications. In one of my own applications, I have accurately reported the sites of over 79 grist mill locations dating from the late 1700s, and well as a number of very remote Civil War entrenchments. Many of these sites are now only accessible by kayak, canoe, or hiking in, and GPS makes finding theses sites a snap.
The Garmin eTrex Legend is a very affordable, nicely featured GPS unit for first-time users for not only a very wide range of traditional outdoor recreational activities, but all of the historical and genealogy applications I have listed.
* I liked the durable, compact, waterproof design; the easily understood menus and controls; and the fairly easy to read map displays. It feels great in my hand, and the battery life is very good.
* A major selling feature for me was 8mb of memory to hold plenty of waypoints, routes, tracks and such, as well as the ability to download a reasonable number of USGS topo maps or other mapping software. (Advanced users will need more storage)
* Users doing historical or genealogical research will want to download topo maps in order to achieve the full potential of this device.
* The unit comes with a handy lanyard and belt clip pouch, but I also bought a windshield mounting device, and also a mount for the handlebars on my mountain bike.
If you are a first time user without needing advanced features, this is a great GPS for not only your routine recreational use, but also for the historical and genealogical applications I listed above.
This was my GPS of choice for years and I highly recommend it to first time users. I moved up to a more advanced model with more technical features (60CSx), but I still carry my Garmin eTrex Legend in reserve and as a loaner for my field research partners.
CHT in Virginia
Customer Review: The Best Way To Go For GPS
Summary: 5 Stars
The Etrex Line is by far the best handheld GPS for the money and size. There is a model that fits every user's needs and budget. Unless you need a magnetic compass and barometric altimeter, the Etrex Legend is probobly the best option. In addition to excellent waypoint and track management functions, the Legend features full mapping functions. The Unit includes a fairly detailed basemap of North America, but for more detailed mapping, data can be downloaded from a MapSource CD-ROM. These discs are availible in many flavors, from Waterway Details, to Topographical, to MetroGuide, which features address and business locating functions (Like Handheld Mapquest.com!)Downloading is easy, and thanks to the unit's high resolution LCD display, maps are suprisingly readable. The waterways disc features a complete database of aids to navigation, cataloging every bouy, daymark, and light in US waters.
As far as GPS functions, the unit preforms beutifully, maintaining a good position fix under moderate tree cover, and inside of a car. Heavy foliage can create a problem, but the unit performs better than most handheld GPS do in this situation. WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) increases accuracy to within 9 feet in good reception areas! Although this is at the expense of battery life. To save power, leave WAAS turned off and you will still get accuracy within 20 feet.
Because the unit uses 2 AA batteries instead of four, life is reduced; expect to change batteries at least every 14 hours, with the unit on continuously. Still, this is less often than my old garmin GPS 45, and that used four batts.
The user interface is very friendly, intuitive, and powerful. This is a great achivment, usually powerful interfaces are not user-freindly and vice versa. It bears quite a similarity to Operating Systems such as Windows and Macintosh, so if you know how to use the computer you are reading this with, you should be right at home. Besides the buttons for Page, Power/Light, Find, Zoom In/Out, there is a "Click Stick" as a pointing device. It works like a joystick or the trackpoint on a laptop to control the cursor on the screen. Pusing it in is like a mouse-click. One strage note on this: it is placed on the left side of the unit. This means that operating in with your'e right thumb blocks the screen. Many people think this is a mistake, making one handed operation with the right hand near impossible, but it makes goos sense to me: operate the GPS in your left hand, while steering the boat with your left. It is not that hard to learn to use the GPS with your left hand (if youre righty), so you can have your right hand free for other things.
In All, The Etrex Legend GPS is your best Buy in a handheld mapping GPS. If your'e looking for more features, check out the more expensive Etrex Vista and Garmin Gpsmap 76, or the very expensive handheld cartographic units, but if you just want a very good, inexpensive, handheld mapping GPS, The Legend is the best around.
Customer Review: Much better than expected
Summary: 5 Stars
Initially I was looking around for a inexpensive GPS receiver to act as a telemetry unit for my R/C vehicles. At first I was seriously considering the basic "Yellow" eTrex, but after looking over the features and the cost differential, I thought that the Legend was a better choice. Thing is, with the additional features, there comes the additional uses :-)The reason I chose the Garmin unit was due both the size (about the size of a cell phone or a pack of cigarettes) and weight (5 oz), which is perfect for my needs.
Performance wise, this unit has exceeded my expectations by a considerable margin. Before my purchase, I was reading some of the other reviews, and it seemed that many of the other purchasers were suggesting that the unit works best on clear days in open areas. While that level of performance was what I basically was after, just for laughs I decided to see how well it could do under less than ideal circumstances. One day I took it out while it was a combination of fog and light rain, and it still tracked OK. There was some hint of signal degradation, but nothing significant. Next, I took it under a tree canopy during the same afternoon. That actually did cause a noticable drop in reception... accuracy went from my units average of 25 feet to 65 feet, but it did still track. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised! Accuracy on a clear day is usually within 25 feet, although I have had it drop to 15 feet on especially nice days.
Durability is not an issue. As noted above, I had it out in a light rain; no problems. Likewise, I had it mounted to the rear spoiler of one of my nitro powered buggies while running it around in a local park, and it didn't even phase it.
Screen is small, but the images are crisp and personally I can live without the color. While I could see how the size could be an issue for some, I found it to be acceptable. Perhaps Garmin or someone else could create a screen magnification tool like that used with the Nintendo Game Boys? I think that would resolve the issues that older users or people with less than good vision might have with this unit.
The other area that I was pleasantly surprised with was overall ease of use. The unit itself is pretty intuative for the most part. Most of the manual is devoted to pre-plotting navigation courses, and correspondingly this is where the lump of issues is probably going to be for the end-user. Still, I didn't have any problems in this area. Actual interface to my PC was painless. Plug in the interface cord to the COM port, hook in the GPS reciever, and that's it. Actual download times from the PC to the GPS unit is a bit slow side, taking about 30 minutes or so to load an 8 Mb regional map into the unit.
Overall, I have been quite happy with this GPS, and would not hesitate to recommend it.
Customer Review: Better than expected
Summary: 5 Stars
Bottom line: I love this gadget. Even though I had downloaded and skimmed through the documentation before buying it, I was surprised at how well it worked and at all the optional features it had. First, about the basic GPS features: It works great, locks onto satellites quickly and shows your position in a matter of seconds. The amount of map detail was surprising?"It doesn??t just have the main Interstate highways, but also all the major surface streets. And that??s not just for the USA, but Canada, Mexico and obscure towns in South America too. And although it??s not advertised, the built-in map has country outlines and major cities for Europe, Asia and Africa as well.
About the only disappointment I had in this department was that although the map had a lot of detail for the streets around my part of Atlanta, the Chattahoochee River was completely missing. However, the map does show the Mississippi flowing through St. Louis, so at least some rivers are present.
I found the usability to be excellent. With just five buttons and a joystick, it??s very easy to find your way around all the features and drill down into the various menus and options. The joystick is a brilliant idea, and I found I could work the main functions while holding the unit in my left hand and jogging.
My major overall disappointment was with the software integration on my laptop. As noted elsewhere on Amazon.com, DeLorme??s Street Atlas software has an abominable user interface, so I hoped this GPS device would work well with Microsoft??s Streets & Trips 2003. Alas, that was not the case. The only thing Streets and Trips shows is a little car icon on the map showing your position, and that??s not even real time?"it only updates every 15 seconds. That may not sound like a long time, but when you??re trying to make a decision at a confusing intersection, it can matter. Streets & Trips doesn??t even show ??bread crumbs,? the trail on the map of where the GPS devices knows it??s been.
Although DeLorme??s Street Atlas is almost unusable due to the bizarre user interface, its integration with GPS devices is much better. The GPS updates the map position in real time, so you can actually see yourself moving down the highway, instead of having the jerky jumps that Microsoft Streets & Trips displays. Also, Delorme will talk to you and tell you when to turn to keep on your route, and it accepts voice input commands as well. So I keep a current version of each software package on my laptop, using Microsoft Streets & Trips for its ease of use in basic mapping and routing functions, and Street Atlas for GPS purposes while in the car.
So in summary, the eTrex Legend generally functions very well, is easy to use, and provides a lot of capability for the price.
Customer Review: Flexible Value - For the Frugal, Not the Cheap
Summary: 5 Stars
This unit provides a good balance between features and price. It is of a convenient size, has an easy to learn interface, and works as advertised.
While not intended to provide address-to-address navigation, the built-in Americas Highways base map provides decent background mapping given its 2MB dataset size and coarse scale. In my locale, all of the major roads that I would care to see are displayed. Large scale detailed streets data are available from Garmin if you need it.
The intuitive interface allows a person to easily explore this unit's capabilities. The built-in trip computer has allowed me a glimpse of the grim reality of how much of drive home is spent literally sitting (stopped) in traffic, even though most of my route is on the Interstate. I also appreciate the relatively large number of tracking log points that the 8MB of internal memory affords.
The NMEA-0183 Interface Standard governs communications between marine navigation equipment via a serial data bus, thus, as would be expected, the included PC interface cable is serial. That said, computer connectivity has worked predictably and reliably, showing me exactly where I am at in Microsoft Streets and Trips on the PC. It's true that my Mac's lack of a serial port prohibits a connection without purchasing a third party adapter, but the reality is that there isn't much great mapping software currently available for this platform (Keyspan is available for about 40USD and is compatible with PC and Mac). The other reality is that my primary purpose for this unit is not as an antenna for mapping software.
While the included compass requires movement to determine bearing and the altitude is inherently not as accurate as lateral position, these shortcomings may not be all that important to the average user. A true electronic compass and a barometric altimeter are available on two other eTrex models. For a small premium, the Summit trades a few of the Legend's features (base map and some utilities) for these two items. For a larger premium, the Vista adds these two items to the full list of Legend features.
If you are looking for something so that you can simply say that you have a GPS unit, look at the standard yellow eTrex or the eTrex Camo for a few dollars more. If you are not a full-on surveyor, but serious about mapping using a GPS as an external antenna for your computer, consider something like the Trimble Pathfinder Pocket (note: this pricier unit uses the serial standard and requires a PC or PocketPC).