Garmin Etrex Legend GPS Receiver
by Garmin
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List Price: Our Price: $149.99 You Save: $50.00 (25%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $72.99 (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: The best GPS in this price range, with one caveat:
Summary: 4 Stars
If you are reading this, you are probably considering the Legend for its combination of price & features, along with the overall user satisfaction. That's why I chose it anyhow. ;)
Before I bought, I too read all of these amazon reviews and decided this GPS would be the best one for the money. ($136 at the time I bought it) I read the reviews of the Magellans, but they were pretty mixed, and their customer service NEVER got any kudos. It seemed like only 50% of their customers were happy out-of-the-box. I was initially attracted to them because they are said to retain satellite lock better than these low-end Garmins. But then I read that they have lower resolution displays, and that they're a lot bigger and heavier. A shame, since some of the medium Magellens had expandable SD memory...
Back to the Garmin Legend, bad news first: reception could be a bit stronger. If you follow Garmin's directions and hold the receiver flat under an unobstructed sky, you will always have excellent reception, a good lock, and good accuracy. (WAAS brings it from 27 ft. down to under 10 ft when you are covered by WAAS enabled satellites) But the signal gets degraded easily. For instance, if you don't hold it flat as you walk around outside, the accuracy generally drops from 10 ft to 50 ft. No big deal really. In the car, mounted to the dash there are never any problems. (check ebay for mounting accessories, unless you want to get gouged for the name-brand ones...)
The features are great, and are pretty easy to learn. The "clik stik' menu navigation is great. The display is very sharp and has great resolution. I can't believe how good it looks. Not that this matters much, but I also like the transluscent blue plastic. I haven't tried any of the external software yet, as it is pricey at around $100. (Garmin is crazy to ask this much for it. Do they think people don't realize how much it is going to cost? If they priced their extra maps at about $20 per country instead of $100+, they would sell a lot more of everything)
I have a friend at work who bought a Legend over a year ago. He just sold it on the bay and got most of his money back and put it towards a Vista C. He says the reception is drastically more reliable. He said that in his bathroom with a roof overhead, he was still able to pick up satellites and get good accuracy. With his Legend, he complained about losing satellite reception when he put it in a chest pocket of his jacket while riding dirtbikes in the desert. He likes that there is 24 MB of memory instead of 8. He likes the display. He also makes about 3X more money than I do, so he can afford a GPS that costs 3X as much as mine! (They're around $360 vs $140)
I went for a 3 mile hike in the forest preserve today and had it hung around my neck with the supplied strap. It worked great, even though it was about 5 degrees Farenheit today. The LCD was getting pretty slow, but everything worked very well.
Some notes if you're also considering the entry level (yellow) eTrex: The built-in USA basemap of the Legend is useful, but it doesn't cover down to street level. Realize that the basic etrex doesn't have this, so it will not be very useful for the car. It has major roads. Generally, anything with a state or interstate # will be on it. If you plan to use it only for outdoor activities where you will never need a map (topographic or street), the basic eTrex has the same hardware but with a smaller LCD screen. I know someone who has a yellow eTrex, and I think her main complaint is that it doesn't have the clik stik. She is an avid hiker and geocacher, and when she enters waypoints (manually, since it doesn't have PC interface capabilities) she doesn't bother to name them since it take so much longer without the clik-stik. She just leaves them numbered.
If you want more information, check out the groundspeak forums. Please do an honest search of the posts that are there before asking questions, as newbies show up and ask the same questions week after week. Someone has already asked your question, believe me.
Bottom line, if you have the dough, buy one of the higher-end Garmins for the reception and memory. If not, you will be very happy with this Legend as long as you realize its limitations.
Customer Review: Excellent price/performance point.
Summary: 5 Stars
Every other person I know who owns a GPS has this model! I believe that's a testament to the performance and price point this model represents.
I finally bought the GPS receiver after buying a kayak. I wanted to know what kind of time we were making so I could plan future outings, and wanted a record of our trips. It works well in that capacity, but I also use it regularly in the car, and on my road bike. I use the suction cup mount, and it tracked my honeymoon train trip across Canada, stuck in the window of the compartment, and I'm amazed at how well it will work in the window of commercial airliners. Sure, it doesn't have the greatest display for use in a car, but this model was not designed for that. Garmin does have better models for that, but you have to pay 6 times or so as much. Regardless, the Legend has been handy getting me unlost on a couple of occasions, and helping me to return to infrequently visited places.
Despite the numerous features packed into this unit, after a few minutes of reading the manual, its operation quickly becomes intuitive, and you can often find features quickly on your own. Of course, some more advanced features, such as building a track using the map, can become somewhat unwieldy, and are better exercised on a PC with the results downloaded to the Legend.
With the complexity of this unit, I'm sure every user can find nits to pick about how some things are done, or under what menus functions should appear. Overall, I am very pleased with how the Legend operates, although I could come up with a long list myself. These items are pretty minor, though.
For example, the trip computer screen is customizable, but it would be nice to be able to store different screens for later use when using the Legend for different applications. The antenna is a patch antenna, and should work best with the unit horizontal with the face upward. However, if it hanging from its neck strap, it's in a very poor position. An optional external antenna would be nice (but would make the unit cost more.) The built-in maps are rather rough. I expect I-95 to be made of straight segments, but think it's inexcusable that US1 crosses to the wrong side of the Florida East Coast railroad in Cocoa.
Again, these are fairly minor points. The biggest complaint in relation to the Legend, although not with the receiver itself, is the price of the accessories. Adding an additional mount (I have the suction cup and bicycle mounts), a cigarette lighter adapter, and map CD costs as much as the street price of the Legend itself!
One thing that impresses me is that Garmin is continually improving the software, and makes the upgrades available for free on their web site. There have been two upgrades in the year since I bought the Legend. When I first got it, and turned it on after it sat in my hot car in the summer (In Florida, it's not really practical to NEVER have to leave it in a hot car at some time), a message would pop up saying that external power had been disconnected and it was turning itself off in 30 seconds! At the time, I didn't OWN an external power source. As the unit would cool, it would be fine. I returned it to Garmin, and they were accomodating, and sent me a new one. Guess what? It did the same thing. But I see the first upgrade included a change to better detect when external power was removed. Since upgrading, I haven't had a problem. It's a little disappointing that it had problems, but encouraging that the manufacturer was helpful, is continually improving the product, and making those upgrades available for free to the consumer.
Like I said, I think the Legend is remarkable performer for the price. The Vista is the next model up in the eTrex line. In going to it, you go from 8 MB of memory to 24 MB, and add a compass and altimeter, but at almost twice the street price. I would like to have seen a model priced between the two without the compass and altimeter but more memory for downloaded maps, like perhaps 16 MB or 24MB.
Although there are always minor things one can think of to improve this product, after a year of use, I am very very pleased with my decision to buy the Garmin eTrex Legend, and it receives a great deal of use.
Customer Review: Good, but not great, for sailboat racing
Summary: 4 Stars
I use a Garmin eTrex Legend for sailing on San Francisco Bay. In particular, for short ocean races out to the Lightship, and the in-Bay Silver Eagle Race. Once you have the waypoints programmed, the GPS is great for finding marks. The unit has a display where you can see direction to mark, your current direction, amount to turn right or left, time to get to mark, at what time (o'clock) you'll arrive at the mark, and VMG to mark. All this information on one page -- awesome! Why?
- First, a GPS automatically takes currents into consideration. If you race on SF Bay or anywhere else with current, you'll know this is very useful. You can set a course toa reach mark in current and a be dead-on, while your competitors sail too high or too low.
- Second, you can use the VMG function and your boat's speedo to determine the actual current strength, and whether you're in bad current or not.
- Third, when crossing a tide line, you can use the GPS to figure out if the tide-line is beneficial or not.
- Fourth, the VMG function is useful for determining if you're sailing too high or too low off the wind.
- Fifth, on a boring ocean race, knowing the time to the mark takes some of the boredom off. This ETA function is very accurate.
The unit is *fairly* easy to use, but not perfectly intuitive. As such, you should play with it a bit before race day, so you can give your skipper the info he needs on a moment's notice.
The unit is really small, so it can be easily carried in a pocket of your jacket or foulies. We use our handheld GPS all the time, and don't use our boat's built-in GPS, which can only be read from the nav table down below. In that sense, this ... unit beats a more expensive ... GPS unit, simply because it's handheld.
The eTrex Legend has a map with buoys built in, so you can turn channel markers into waypoints fairly easily. (See below for what I mean by "fairly easily").
One winning TransPac navigator that navigated to Hawaii by using a Garmin handheld GPS unit. These devices are that good. (Of course, he had a couple of backup GPS units and a sextant just in case.)
On to the negatives:
- It's way too time-consuming to enter waypoints into the unit. I wish I could just jam in some lat/long coordinates on my PC and then synch those waypoints with my GPS, similar to how I can synch my PC with my Palm. Entering a single lat/long coordinate into the unit takes maybe 3 minutes. If I could do it on a PC, it would take one-tenth the time.
- Turning channel markers into waypoints is hard. It's hard to explain, but you'll be viewing a channel marker on the map, press "enter waypoint", and you'll enter your current lat/long as the waypoint, not the channel marker's lat/long. For my job, I'm used to working with buggy software. But if you don't have patience with hard-to-use software, you'll find this very annoying.
- Waypoints can only have about 12 characters. While this is better than some other units, it's not enough to store waypoints with names like "South Tower Golden Gate Bridge" or "Southampton Shoal". This might seem like a big deal, but on our boat, we'll hand off the GPS unit to whoever's not busy trimming a sail, so they can call out our bearing to the next mark. It's a hassle to explain to a new navigator that "sth twr ggb" means the South Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. It's kind of like the old days of DOS, where filenames could only be eight characters.
- You can only "go to" one waypoint at a time. Quite often, we'll want to "go to" two waypoints. For example, if you're sailing back from the Lightship, you want to aim for the South Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, but if you surf down a killer wave, you don't want to sail south of Mile Rock. So the navigator has to constantly switch between these two waypoints, and that's a hassle.
In summary:
- Great device once waypoints are entered
- Entering waypoints is a major hassle (Garmin, are you reading this?!)
Customer Review: Etrex Legend
Summary: 4 Stars
I purchased the ETrex Legend for the sole purpose of Geocaching (look it up on the web if you don't know what I'm talking about). I soon found it invaluable for driving, finding my way around strange cities, snowshoeing off trail and hiking.
The Legend is a compact, easy to use unit. At its list price, it has a great price/feature ratio. The Vista has more memory and a magnetic compass, but I haven't seen the need for more memory yet and my $10 compass works just fine (and doesn't need batteries).
At first I was concerned about the 8 meg of memory not being enough, but I've downloaded the MapSource topo for northern NJ, southern NY to Albany and much of soutern Vermont with room to spare. On a trip to Sacramento, I was able to download the area around Sac, from San Francisco to Tahoe.
It comes with a base map that is very basic. It shows major roads, rivers, lakes and points of interest. I do recommend eventually getting one of the MapSource maps. If you are an outdoorsperson, you should get the Topo. If you travel often, Roads and Recreation is the one to buy.
There are some issues with reception under heavy leaf cover, but as I understand it, this is a problem with most GPSr's.
The clic-stick is a great feature, making navigating your way around the unit's features a breeze. The Legend is durable (I've dropped it many times) and water resistant (dropped it in water) and I recommend it to anybody who wants a full featured unit with map capability and doesn't want to spend a bundle.
Update 2 years later:
After over a year and a half of use I was still very happy with my Legend. I found that there were no reception issues under heavy leaf cover as long as I held the GPS the way the mfr. recommends, which is flat with the face up to the sky. Admittedly this is fine for a while, but for long hikes it can be a pain, so I purchased the neoprene carrier and I cliped it to the top of my pack's shoulder belt to solve this. Another way to improve reception in the woods is to turn it on well before you enter the woods, so it knows where all the sats are. As long as I hold it correctly, I rarely lose reception even under heavy leaf canopy and the few times I do, I get it back within seconds.
I've used my unit alongside Magellan Meridian and Sportrak users as well as users of other Garmin models and my reception was comparable.
The one problem I had was with the rubber gasket that surrounds the unit. The glue degraded after a while and the gasket would slip. I sent it back to Garmin and they repaired it for free as it was still under warranty. I think leaving the unit on the dashboard of a hot car in the summer may have contributed to this.
I liked the Legend so much, that when I felt it was time to upgrade, I purchased its big brother, the Vista.
Update - July 2008:
This was a good unit it it's day, but GPS technology has passed it by and the newer units are far better and don't cost much more. This is still in Garmin's line which is why I felt it was necessary to post this update. The newer eTrex units (any with an H in the model name) have a high sensitivity receiver that gets great reception under trees and even indoors. Most importantly some of them are just a few bucks more than this dinosaur. If you are considering this unit, take a look at the eTrex Venture HC, or eTrex Legend HCX. They have better reception, a color display, more map memory, fast USB connections and more. This uses the old serial connection that most PC don't even come with any more and the reception doesn't come close to that of the Legend HCX and Venture HC.
Customer Review: Good value GPS / great features
Summary: 4 Stars
after looking at several different levels of Garmins (Vista, Summit, Geko, Venture and several Magellans), I decided on this not because its a real important piece of equipment that my life would depend on, but something new and interesting to do (i.e. geocaching, traveling and so on).I first looke at getting a GPS handheld a few years ago and at that time they were 300 bucks for a basic model w/ not nearly as many features as this. The reason I chose the Legend over the other models and brands was:
1- price + rebate.
2- 8MB of built in memory
3- preloaded roadmaps.
Those three pretty much sum up the legend. It may not be the smallest thing out there, but I was very impressed with the gadget. When I first took it outside it took about 4-5 minutes to load up and get aclimated and track the satellites and do whatever else it does. And after it did that the accuracy estimation went from ~300 feet down to between 18-20 feet and that is what I usually get for a reading.
Yesterday was the first time it picked up the WAAS satelite and I saw the accuracy at 8 feet. For some reason I don't get the WAAS connection very much, but I give that to that I read there are two of the buggers floating up there for the moment and they are both over the equator and over opposite hemispheres, and being in PA it might be a little hard to see it well at the horizon, but anyway even without then a 20 foot accuracy is plenty for geocaching.
My friend has an older Magellan 12 (one that i originally looked at buying a while ago) and he held mine and turned it on, and saw the accuracy and the below other cool functions and its three place second division reading (compared to his 2), he loved it. He even told me that the next trip he took he got mad at his because he count get better reception he threw it in the woods and was going to buy one like mine.
I read some people have trouble with reception. I never had a problem, Mine picks up between 4-5 sats while I am indoors!. The accuracy while inside is around 30 feet, but who cares, I inside right?
The other feature I love on this are the trip computer, it calculates present speed, average speed, altitude (GPS sat based not asensor like the Summit), compass, trip odometer, it even split your stopped time and moving time during the trip. (ever want to know how much time you spend at red lights going to work? this will tell you). And the best is the real time map. It plots your route along the map as it scrolls with your vehicle or path.
The reason for 4 stars and not 5. Mearly because you have to spend so much more money for the small streets that need to be loaded into it from the company's CD. But the cool thing is that I can plug it into a laptop that is running Microsoft's Streets program and it will communicate to that program so I don't really need to load the CD into the GPS.
Great gadget for a great price, especially with the ... rebate when I bought it.
Additional... Plan on spending some time in trying to figure out how to enter waypoints/places and using them to navigate (not to mention the time involved in entering coordinates manually w/ the click stick or panning the map to enter them.)