HarryBlack

What about the first Venture, I has nothing in common with the new Ventures, why is even being made anymore. At least with Magellan it is easy to follow there thinking. In about a year Garmin may have 50 hand helds, it is just crazy

You really do not need a top of the line GPS for caching While I am a new cacher myself, I have been using a Magellan explorist 210 and I am very happy with it.Best of all it do not cost much, I paid a little over 200 with softwarre

I was thinking of using pokers chips, are these good to use

THe Garmin Venture is one of the earler versions of the e-trex series. THe $150.00 prices so to much for that GPS. For a few dollars more you can get the Magellan Explorist 210. THe 210 has 22MB if memorywill support a detailed map display, the Venture will not. THe 210 has a newer receiver, the Venture has been known to problimatic under heavy tree cover The Garmin Legend would be better than the Venture and can be found for less than $150.00 but the Legend will have the came problems as the Venture under tree cover and only has 8MB of memory for map storage. THe Explorsit 210 uses USB data transfer the Legend does not.

National Geographic is the best software for maps, the NG Topo state maps are scanned USGS Topographic maps and are going to give you best detail. But they are Topographic maps, not trail maps. If you want to load a topo map into your GPS you must use the software that is made by the manufacture of your GPS. What I have done is used the NG topo maps to print out detailed maps with the cache locations displayed on them. SOmetimes it can be easier to use a paper map than a map that is the size of a match book cover.