MrMullen

Yes, as I have always understood, you will see sats in test mode (They were just launched or relocated to another orbit) but not get a lock. I have heard this is because they are sending a signal but there is no GPS useful data in it. I have to say it is pretty neat to see a sat in test mode for some time and then watch it come online and be useful.

Is it pointless that a Sirf chip can support 20 satellites at once? If GPS has 24 (21 in services and 3 spares) satellites, then that means only 12 are on your side of the planet at once and probably only 10 of those are viewable. If this is true, then what is the point of being able to process data for something that is not even possible?

I don't know about the base maps turn by turn navigation, but the Venture Cx does have turn by turn if you get a memory card and upload maps to it that support turn by turn. I have use the Metro Guide v4 (I think that is it) and it works just fine. You tune a couple of things on Mapsource, but other than that, it works how you think it would work. Also, my Venture Cx does all that stuff that it says it does for Legend Cx. All I did was buy a memory card and a USB cable, which was a whole lot less thant he price difference between the Legend and the Venture.

GPS working all over the world is the whole point of GPS. The G in GPS is Global. If you are the North Pole, GPS will tell you where you are, if you are at the South Pole, GPS will tell you where you are and if you are anywhere in between, GPS will tell you where you are. As for GPS's for the America market working in Germany, yes, they will. Most GPS's run on either batteries or a car adaptor and those are standards around the world. Buy AA's for your American GPS in Germany and they will work. In fact, the only difference between an American market GPS and a German market GPS is the langauge on the box. The map datum is easily changeable in the GPS. My Garmin GPS support many many map datums.

Any of the GPS's we American's use should work just fine in Europe. Since so many toursts use GPS on the road, getting a GPS that has english maps of Europe should be no problem. Here Garmin European maps

This is the only complant I have about my Garmin eTrex Venture. I can load it with maps with autorouting capibilities and do address searches around my county, but I can't do address searchs for areas outside of my county. For example, I live in San Diego and I wanted to plot a route to Seattle, Washington, but I could not type in the address even if I told the GPS that the address I was searching for was in Seattle. However, if I get on the map and manually find the address with the click stick, I can auto route to it just fine. It's really wierd that I can not type in an address outside of my county I am in.

But I think the point is that most people are going to buy a card bigger than 32M. I know when I get a Cx model, I plan to buy a 1G card and never use the undersize card that comes with it. I bought a digital camera and a 1G card. I have yet to touch the 32M card that came with it.

I have some-what have had that problem when I was riding in the car at the speed where the GPS switches from using the real compass to the GPS compass (It connects the dots and figures out your direction). The problem I had was when you slow down, then speed up , then slow down again and again and so on and so on. You might set the GPS compass switch over to a higher speed like 20 mph or so. The other thing to do is make sure your Vista firmware is at atleast 2.50 (Which is the latest). I had a number of problems while using an older firmware which went away when I upgraded. The last thing to note is that you might have to calibrate the compass everytime you change the batteries. I really don't know since I don't use compass that much, natural sense of direction I guess.