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: incredible piece of technology for the hiker
Summary: 4 Stars
The GPS etrex Legend from Garmin offers the amazing possibility to locate oneself on earth with an accuracy of 1-2meters, this for an affordable price and a compact design (cell phone size), a lot of achievements!The device is reasonably user friendly to use with a few menus and a tiny joystick. It is of course a bit tedious while driving and it is better to pull on the side, but when hiking in clear areas it is very usable. In the city the purpose of the etrex is sort of uncertain, better have the thomas guide, but the large paper pages would not fit in a pocket. A few luxury cars have now a GPS and nice display and probably in 10 years computer assisted driving will be very advanced.
With the etrex it is not possible to get lost in wild nature, unless batteries die down! For battery duration i measured about 50mA just on, +50mA GPS activated and +50mA light on, so at night the conso of total 150mA is a bit high (but light autoturns off rapidly).
I was unable to feel the WAAS mode so far, maybe the special satellite was not in view.
My favorite feature is the bread crumb tracks that follow my hiking or driving around with quite some precision. I was able to retrace nearby surface streets. I also conducted some geeky repeatability tests on a big soccer field and saw some dither of waypoints at each corner, but come on: 1-2 meters is good! Think of ancient navigators in the oceans looking at the sun and some stars with a sextant and locating themeselves to miles....
My main regret would be the screen, it is low resolution and no colors. The basemap of LA is super crowded of course. (Was it hard to insert one of today's fine color LCDs, like the back of digital cameras?). I could pay $50 more for this luxury. I will rank 4 stars then. Basically one needs to download the bread crumbs onto a PC which requires the rs232 cable (furnished) and i believe the mapsource CD (not furnished, add about $100. Note: maybe there are ways for the tech oriented person to have the PC interrogate the etrex without the CD, or for the digital photographer to take photos of the screen and stich them to recreate a big image...very tedious)
I give 'coup de coeur' for this marvel of high tech
Customer Review: Garmin Legend
Summary: 1 Stars
Pros:
If you live in the tree barren, Mojave Desert plains on a sunny, cloudless day, with a clear view of the sky, then this unit operates acceptably. If you live in space with an unobstructed view of all the global positioning satellites, then this unit operates just fine. If you are in space, docked directly to three global positioning satellites then this unit operates flawlessly.
Real World: If you are in a park, on a dirt trail, under a canopy of leave-less tree boughs with overcast skies, at least the date you set will be correct. It is then you will find and view the cool LCD animation of the phases of the moon. You will confidently cycle through command screens to see that your top walking speed was in excess of 80mph.
Features: Cold start satellite acquisition in a brisk 7 to 10 minutes if you are absolutely motionless with a clear view of the sky on a sunny day in space. The two fully charged NIMH AA batteries will provide nearly 8 hours of displaying the the "Lost Satellite Reception" message which you then can adjust the contrast so you can see it sharply and clearly or faintly. If you do have the rare opportunity to lock on to the feeble signal of 3 or more satellites and achieve the pinpoint accuracy of + - 250 feet you can zoom in and out to see the map pointer behind an absolutely blank screen, miles away from the nearest road or that you are actually standing out in the river/ocean.
Accessories: For about half the price of the unit, you can purchase additional software that will display enhanced maps and
topographic information and thousands of points of interest under the "Lost Satellite Reception" message. The included serial cable will allow you to download the waypoints at a scathing 11550bps that you set while you were standing out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The optional belt clip holder/protector comes complete with a highly reflective screen protector, (no extra charge) so that no one else can look over your shoulder and see the "Lost Satellite Reception" message.
Summary: Mongo paint map on cave wall by light of fire, show tribe he not lost.
Customer Review: Good value, but some problems
Summary: 3 Stars
I recently buried my Legend after two years of service. I used it for canoe, backpack and motorcycle navigation, and for plot relocation. The basic GPS is, like all eTrex units, well designed - small, lightweight, waterproof, with an easy-to-use, fairly intuitive user interface. (I have often wished Apple had hired Garmin to write the iPod interface.) The GPS receiver is pretty good, but has been eclipsed by the new SiRF receiver used, for instance, in the Garmin GPSMap 60Cx Handheld GPS Navigator. You should definitely consider a SiRF receiver if you will be in cities, forests or canyons. The display in the eTrex suffers from small size, low resolution, and being black-and-white. It adds up to an almost unusable map. This is a manageable drawback; no GPS will replace a good map because they all have tiny screens in comparison to the average road map, and maps are all about organizing spatial data. With the eTrex, I found that I used the navigation and trip computer screens much more than the map screen. As for getting data into and out of the eTrex, it's a bit of a headache. The interface is serial, which is very slow if you're used to USB devices. The cables cost a fortune - if you buy Garmin's brand, a full set of power and data cables will cost half as much as the GPS! Most map software these days can communicate with this model Garmin, but it often takes quite a bit of labor to figure out how. The eTrex does work well with the Garmin proprietary map packages, but those packages were designed for use with more high-end units so the eTrex doesn't utilize their features as well as it might, especially since it only has 8MB of memory. In comparison the GPSMAP 60C takes up to 2GB of memory, enough to load an entire Garmin CD with room to spare. Finally, my eTrex died because the screen stopped working. It happened gradually, and occasionally comes back to life if you give it a good knock, so it must be a loose connection of some sort. I believe this reflects poor vibration resistance, so I can't recommend this unit for motorcycle use.Customer Review: Small size, BIG technology!
Summary: 5 Stars
Just a few years ago a mapping gps would have cost you over 350bucks, today you can get this pocketsized unit for under 150(after rebate).This thing is fantastic for hiking, kayaking, geocaching, cycling and perhaps driving...but this is not an auto navigation system! It does not provide automatic routing, or verbal nav instructions. If you preenter a route using waypoints it will display "approaching turn" and the compass arrow will preview the direction. So it's not really functional for driving, it IS entertaining to use as a speedo/trip computer however.
Where it really shines is in the great outdoors. it's the ultimate pointing device! mount it on your bike and it's the most full featured cyclocomputer ever! I use it kayaking to waypoint fishing spots and measure my route. I use it walking/jogging to measure my route. and just for fun you can take the kids geocaching! I haven't used it on the golfcourse yet, with average accuracy of 20ft it may not be accurate enough.
Unit is very solid feeling, easy to use (my five year old can navigate to a cache with it). the click stick is simple to use, but options are hidden in submenus...so practice will make perfect. Waypoints can be managed and uploaded easily using mapsource or easygps...and the included serial cable(though USB would be preferable!).
Compared to the Magellan sporttrak(yellow) this unit is smaller and more feature packed for approx the same money. This unit's size makes it more versatile to me, for use on the bicycle and kayak. The magellan may have a bigger antenna, but my test showed the same accuracy side by side, under tree cover.
I've yet to get the 3M accuracy they claim. It averages about 20ft, but I've never seen below 15, Even with WAAS enabled.
The basemap of this unit is very crude, and not very accurate, so for mapping you'll really need to invest in a Mapsource CD.
All in all a great gadget for the outdoor enthusiast!
Customer Review: Wonderful for the price
Summary: 5 Stars
I am really enjoying the eTrex Legend. As one reviewer said, the map is similar to those provided by the rental car agency. But it includes enough streets in Los Angeles to keep me oriented, and has kept me from getting lost in rural areas. You'll notice that the roads are simplified to save memory so that the GPS tracking may accurately show a dozen curves where the GPS map shows one. (Which is actually kind of fun to watch.) But that allows the software to include a LOT of roads. My Americas version covers North, Central and South American highways and basic city street maps for large cities in the USA. I can even scroll over and create waypoints for old world cities with over 200k population, although other functionality is limited outside the Americas.) The GPS tracking itself is very accurate and maps precisely to my TOPO maps. I am primarily writing to respond to an earlier reviewer who found the unit inaccurate under cover. The eTrex is certainly as accurate as my Garmin GPS 12, and comparisons on the internet rate it fairly highly. The problem with cover seems to be general to handheld GPS units. You can't expect a tiny antenna to find satellites through several layers of leaves--although the eTrex makes a valiant effort.
I do have one complaint, however, with Garmin rather than the unit. Garmin promotional materials would leave you with the impression that the unit only works with the Map Source maps. My TOPO map (from National Geographic) not only works fine, but even recognizes the model. The older software doesn't download the graphic map (roads and topography), but it uploads and downloads waypoints and routes just as it did on my old GPS 12. And downloading just waypoints doesn't overwrite the existing data the way I understand that downloading maps from MapSource can.
Hope that helps with your decision. This is a fun unit that will do the job.