Garmin GPS 60CSx Handheld GPS Navigator
by Garmin
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List Price: Our Price: Calculated in a shopping cart Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
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for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Garmin GPS 60CSx Handheld GPS Navigator
Customer Review: Garmin GPS60CSX
Summary: 5 Stars
I spent a lot of time researching this unit before buying it and I can say I found nothing but favorable reviews and what most impressed me were the folks who have to use GPS for a living. I would highly recommend this unit for purchase. Good Battery life, nice size screen and viewable under 99% of light condictions, Very fast signal acquistion and Very accurate. However, the base map it comes with is disappointing as its very limited. Get the 24k Topo Map on SDcard and you will be very satisfied. The 24k Topo is a good investment but the unit does come with a 1gb microsd card to download additional maps. Other than the 24k Topo map which you must purchase in addtion you really need no other map products unless you want to use the GPS For Mobile use where you may want the Garmin Street Guide. However, If you want to go mobile buy a Garmin Nuvi as it will work much better for mobile use. As for Ground work this GPS is the Cats Meow. Go for it. You will not be disappointed.Customer Review: exactly what i wanted and needed.
Summary: 5 Stars
I'll be the first to admit that I'm directionally challenged. I have a hard time correlating on the map exactly where I am without stopping to triangulate my position, and if there are no real landmarks, or higher areas in the area, I have to be very careful not to get lost. This unit keeps me on track, and using my map, and GPS, and compass, I've found myself much more confident in places like the BWCAW, and other areas like it. I rarely have problems with satellites getting through; and the fact that it's easy to keep on you, using the provided clip, makes it that much more user friendly since you're more apt to take it along. The basic provided map is just o.k., and you'll soon want to upgrade to for better mapping software. Customer Review: Comes with 1GB microSD, not 64MB
Summary: 4 Stars
Could be smaller and thinner but it works great. No need to purchase an extra memory, 1GB is big enough.Customer Review: Very Accurate GPS
Summary: 5 Stars
Have had this GPS unit now for several weeks and am extremely satisfied with the unit. It is very accurate and is able to pick up and track sats even indoors. Only thing that would make the unit better would be improvements to the manufacturers website, less expensive map downloads and software that was fully MAC compatible.Customer Review: What a Huge Disappointment.
Summary: 1 Stars
All alpinists understand how crucial it is to always know what their elevation is. Unfortunately, keeping an accurate account of elevation is impossible with this GPS due to its altimeter, which cannot be deactivated, according to Garmin Tech Support.
You can't just use satellite data to determine elevation like with other GPS units. Instead, the unit takes some sort of average of what the satellites determine and over-mixes it with the altimeter data. This is giving me wildly changing and inaccurate elevation readings, even when my elevation is static. This is of course due to ever changing atmospheric pressure. This means that you must recalibrate the altimeter constantly. In order to recalibrate you must know the elevation you are at. (I reject the notion of using atmospheric pressure in such circumstances to recalibrate the altimeter. It works for pilots but is highly hazardous to an alpinist.)
But if you are able to continually recalibrate the altimeter because you always know your altitude, either based on fixed points or careful reading of decent topo maps, what is the point of the altimeter? The bottom line is that this unit is practically worthless for determining altitude for anything but very short periods of time unless weather conditions remain fairly static.
I climb almost exclusively in South America where accurate topo maps and fixed points are scarce to non-existent. The inability to use this unit to determine elevation makes it useless to me. I cannot stress enough that an alpinist should never buy a GPS unit, which uses the altimeter to determine elevation, unless the altimeter can be deactivated!
Of all of the corresponding instruction manuals for electronic devices that I have owned in my life, the 60CSx instruction manual is by far the worse. This GPS has a steep learning curve which is made infinitely worse by having an instruction manual that barely scratches the surface.
One example should suffice. The electronic compass interferes with the laying of tracks. You need to hold the unit level and point the antenna in front of you to make a highly reliable track. This is due to the fact that the factory has preset the unit to show compass direction, as opposed to direction determined solely by the satellite data, if you are going less than 10 miles an hour. Of course this can be set to as little as 1 km per hour so that as long as you are moving, even a little bit, the unit will make a very accurate and reliable track. However, nowhere in the instruction manual (including page 50), is any of this discussed. You simply have to figure it out on your own through trial and error.
Also, the chipset the unit shipped with is not the most recent and the unit will not update to the latest version. No one in Garmin Tech Support can explain this.
All in all, this is the most disappointing electronic purchase I have ever made and am stuck with it as I am now in South America and can't exchange it for a replacement due to customs laws down here. For now, I will simply continue to use my trusty and reliable Magellan SporTrak Pro.
I love Amazon.com and have spent a sizable fortune here over the years. For the sake of fairness to Amazon.com, I admit that this is the first horrible product that I have ever purchased from them. And, I blame Garmin, not Amazon.com.
I wrote this review because I feel a particular responsibility to my fellow alpinists to give them fair warning about this product. Don't trust your life with it.
Caveat Emptor