Garmin I3 Streetpilot Sat Nav

[village hall mice]

Hi,

 

I am considering buying the Garmin i3 Streetpilot as a economical entry in to sat nav. It gets good reviews but my main question is does it do a latitude/longitude search as well as a postcode search? I mainly want it to help guide me to caching locations but still use handheld gps to locate caches.

 

Any info would be appreciated

 

Thanks

[+Jaz666]

The i3 is a fantasic In Car Sat Nav for the price, but it is not pratical for outdoor use.

a) It's not water/splashproof

You cannot enter lat/long

c) You cannot explore the map (point to a place and say take me there).

 

You could use it to get near the cache location, but you'd need to know the nearest town/village and streetname.

[+Olar]

I looked at Garmin's site and read about this neat little unit. Looks great for in-car use but doesn't appear it would lend itself very well to using as a handheld for geocaching. Sounds like you could download various coordinates as custom points-of-interest with the free POI Loader from Garmin but you will not see necessary data needed to find a cache.

I did a search on the POI Loader and found a few discussions about the very subject. Have a look at:

 

This one

another one

a third one

a fourth

 

Good Luck, Olar

[peter]

I'd look at the Garmin Quest as more of an all-purpose unit that's still oriented mainly towards vehicle use. Price is similar (CostCo sells it currently for $300) and although it doesn't take memory cards it does have 115 MB available which is generally sufficient.

It's more easily pocketable, weather resistant (IPX7), longer battery life, and more features suitable for hiking and other outdoor uses, including geocaching.

Edited November 24, 2005 by peter

[+Maeglin]

The Garmin POI Loader will let you transfer lat/lon waypoints to the i3, yes. It requires the coords in a CSV file, and the format information is included with the program. It will route to the closest point along a road to the coords, which should work well for parking coords but not so well in some cases for cache coords, depending on where the cache is.

 

I haven't used that capability for caching yet, but have used it for getting to a friend's place where normal geocoding (translation of address to lat/lon, for the uninitiated) was WAY off. Fortunately they're cachers as well, so getting the correct coords was easy.

 

...and more features suitable for hiking and other outdoor uses, including geocaching.

Except, perhaps, for the patch antenna built into the thing. Not the best choice, I hear, for hiking in the middle of the woods.

Edited November 25, 2005 by Maeglin

[peter]

...and more features suitable for hiking and other outdoor uses, including geocaching.

Except, perhaps, for the patch antenna built into the thing. Not the best choice, I hear, for hiking in the middle of the woods.

I don't think you'll hear many complaints about reception in the woods from users of Lowrance iFinder or GM100 models, the Magellan eXplorists, or the Garmin LegendC/VistaC (or even older Garmins like the GPS12 and eMap). All of these use patch antennas and have good reception performance. The models where one frequently hears of problems are the b&w eTrexi which is hardly a sufficient reason to attribute it to a specific type of antenna.