dcgibson55

I got mine in 1997. It always seemed to work OK but I decided to upgrade about a month ago and bought a Magellan eXplorist 500. What a difference. I've been having a blast geocaching. I brought the Pioneer along looking for a cache. It's not suitable for that.

I've had my 500 for three weeks and so far am happy with it. I've only been using it for geocaching. I ran into this; I've heard from a couple of people who were able to pry this out of Magellan: http://www.rebateplace.com/forms/9643.pdf They said you have to call them on the phone to get it. I've e-mailed customer support twice (once immediately after purchase and the other October 30) with no replies. I did get an e-mail customer support survey on October 30: "Thank you for recently contacting Thales Navigation’s Technical Support Center for your Magellan product(s). We continually strive to provide the best possible service to our customers and would appreciate your candid feedback regarding your most recent experience with our Technical Support Center". Isn't that kind of bass-ackwards? Is their customer support located in Bombay or similar? If it's good I don't care. My Dell tech support was but they were knowledgable. The 500 probably does more than I need but the price was good. My other GPS is a 1997 GPS Pioneer. What a difference!

Oct 21 2006, 09:16 AM Costco has the 500 on sale for $180 including shipping. It includes the topo software. The Topo software says it is compatible with a lot of Magellans but they don't mention the eXplorist series at all. Costco has their act together and I doubt they'd make a mistake like that. Of course I just bought a 500 about 10 days ago; at that time Costco's price was way high. Now that I've bought it it's cheap. Oh well. I paid $190 including shipping. Amazon dropped their price the next day. I bought it from a place I'll never ever buy anything from again. They do not give you a dated invoice. All that was in the box is an undated packing list. I asked for a dated invoice and they say two e-mails I got from them acknowledging my order and giving me the tracking number are the invoice. I hope Magellan will accept that if I need service during the warranty period. So far I'm very pleased with it. Geocaching with the 500 is a snap; of course I'm just beginning and have only done local easy caches. I had an ancient (1997) Magellan GPS Pioneer that seemed OK. The 500 completely blows it out of the water. Indoors the Pioneer is not interested in communicating with satellites unless you sit next to the window and have lots of time to spare. The 500 gets the job done pronto. The included mapping is better than I expected. I was in LA Saturday and the 500 shows major streets by name.