Willibauer

I believe you can view the most up to date Topo maps at the garmin website. If so, that should give you a pretty good idea of whether you need to upgrade or not. Willibauer

You'll need Garmin's street maps (City Navigator) in order to have the unit auto-route. While it can auto-route using topo maps, you'll find that the street data is out of date (by decades, in some cases). It can't autoroute using Topo. It will try to autroute on the base map if you have Topo selected. I've got the TOPO Canada map loaded onto my Legend HCX. It auto routes fine for me. I just mark a waypoint where I want to go, then click goto, then it asks whether I want to follow the road or go offroad (as the crow flies) and it figures out a route via the existing roads on the topo map. The only reason I could see that I would need the City maps would be for the POI's. The topo maps give me outdoorsy type points of interest. Rivers, bays, points out in the water, parks, etc. Perhaps it's different than your topo maps because they're Canadian ones. Not sure, but I know it works great as an auto GPS. I use it all the time finding places. Willibauer

I've got the same unit. I currently have a 1gb micro card installed with approx 350mb of topo canada maps installed. Everything works wonderfully here. I'm just guessing here, but it seems like you have some sort of conflict with the software on the card rather than a hardware problem. Have you tried deleting the maps and reinstalling them? I'd go that route first and then give them call or email or whatever if that doesn't work. Willibauer

Yes

Main Menu > Setup > Display > You can fiddle with whichever color you choose there. Or just make it stay on one color all the time. Willibauer

I just purchased the Legend HCx from gpscentral.ca. It was 239$. The Vista was 40$ more. I got the topo canada maps as well for 89$ if you buy a gps from them. After shipping and gst it was 363$ or so. So far I love the unit. I have yet to lose a signal. Most times outdoors it's +/- 3m. Sitting here indoors at my computer it's at 4m. I have a decent compass and the barometer gets you to within 10m elevation whereas the electronic elavation gets you to within 50m I believe. It's as close as I'll ever need. Plus I've got the topo maps so I can just use those. I'm sure if you're planning on staring at the GPSr every 20 seconds while hiking the built in compass would be useful. People have said that zeroing in on a cache is nice with the compass. Others said you had to calibrate it all the time, still others said they did that once a year at the most... I don't know. I went without this time around. I believe I've read that the topo Canada software can be loaded on as many GPSr's as you want. I didn't get any unlock code or anything. I installed it on my computer, selected the maps I want, send to GPSr and off it went. So providing they'll let you return opened software you may in the clear. Using it without paying for it would be against the EULA they have you agree to however. So that's up to you. I haven't used the hunting/fishing other than looking at it. It gives you a prediction (Good day, poor day, etc.) and the best times of the day to hunt/fish. I looked at the 199$ Legend and topo maps as well. But talked myself out of it and spent what turned out to be another 140$ish dollars for a color unit with the better chip. I used my phone as a GPSr for the last few months and it lost signal all the time. Having a unit that rarely loses signal is certainly a treat. Willibauer

From what I've learned researching over the past few days, the x stands for expandable memory. ie, you can use a microdisk in the unit. Those without the x would have an amount of built in memory on which to upload maps, etc. The C stands for color screen IIRC and the H stand for a higher sensitivity satellite locater. And then various model names, ie Summit, Venture, Vista, Legend have varying attributes to each unit. Garmin has a good comparison webpage to see each unit side by side. www.garmin.com Willibauer Just got this from a review... "The "H" stands for the new high-sensitivity receiver which gives the unit the ability to capture satellites in a "green tunnel". The "C" stands for a color screen. The "x" indicates a slot for a MicroSD flash memory card (no built-in map memory)."

Howdy all, So I've went out hunting a couple times now without a GPS and I believe I'm hooked. I just placed an order for a Legend HCx and the Canadian topo maps. (Got a great deal, or at least the best I've seen so far) It should be here in the next few days. I was going to go for the Vista HCx but thought I'd save the $40 CDN and do without the compass/barometer. I always have a magnetic compass with me on hikes or in the boat anyways. Thought I'd stop by and say thanks to everyone for there VERY helpful posts on the different types of GPS units. Without the research and opinions available on these forums I would have ended up with a GPS I'm sure wouldn't have done what I wanted it to do. Almost bought an etrex Legend (blue one) with a topo map included in a package. After talking myself out of that and doing a bit of shopping/research I ended up with the HCx and the maps for ~$100 more. I'm sure it will be well worth it. Happy hunting. Willibauer