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Looking for advice on Garmin Automotive GPS Device


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Hi folks, I'm completely in love with my 60CSx but realize it's not really the best for automotive use plus I would like the wife to have something in her car that we switch over to mine when necessary.

 

The Garmin C320 is really priced right now but was wondering what you all think about units in this price range.

 

thanks

 

Escapethematrix(gary).

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A co-worker just bought a C320 a couple weeks ago. We went for a ride to test it out, and I was impressed with the routes it produced and the speed with which it calculated them. Much better than the eXplorist 400 I had with me. The voice prompts are nice too. The only beef I had with it was the amount of time it took for the unit to get a position fix the first time we turned it on, which was like 15 minutes. Works without a problem, and he said it was great for his vacation in Missouri. He was able to look up a Radio Shack, get a phone number to call and find out if they were open, and then have the C320 route to the store.

 

I see you are in Plainfield. TigerDirect's store/warehouse in Naperville has it available for $320 (before tax) if you want to get a decent price and don't want to wait for shipping from another vendor.

Edited by geognerd
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I picked up a c320 about six weeks ago. My requriements were similar, it had to be easy to move between vehicles and easy enough for the wife to operate by herself. I did quite a bit of research and had it narrowed down to the i3 and c320. After several stops I finally found a store that had both on display so I could play with them. It was a no-brainer, the larger screen and touchscreen interface made the c320 worth the extra money.

 

I used it on our recent 3000 mile vacation and am very pleased. The wife didnt have any problems figuring it out to find us a restaurant or motel. I wasnt really interested in the voice prompts but now find I like them.

 

There is really only one thing is difficult. If your destination does not appear on one of the units lists (one of the built-in points of interest) getting the destination is a pain. You can spell it, but I didnt have much luck with that. It didnt "find" Cody, WY when we were about 150 miles away and I spelled it out. You can also pan around the map and select but that is just slow and awkward. My solution was to put major things I was likely to want as destinations into the unit as POIs.

 

I got mine at amazon.com. They have it unit for 309.99 right now with free "super saver" shipping. You can get free 2nd day (or $4 overnight) by signing up for their Amazon Prime. If you get offered a free trial of Prime, take it. I was able to "pre-cancel" it right from my account page.

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My biggest beef with the C3x0 units don't support tracking and don't support multiple destination routes. The fact the only way you can delete waypoints one at a time or via a master reset of the unit (confirmed with Garmin staff) only furthers my impression that these really aren't what you want to toss 400 geocaches into.

 

Granted, it's bigger and doesn't run on batteries, but as a power navigator, I'd take a 2610 (with bigger screen + remote) that can be found on closeout for not a lot more than a C320.

 

That said, Aunt Tillie would surely like the C3x0's better. The user interface on that class of products gains a lot of its simplicity by _not_ having features for the power navigators...

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The fact the only way you can delete waypoints one at a time or via a master reset of the unit (confirmed with Garmin staff) only furthers my impression that these really aren't what you want to toss 400 geocaches into.

 

Not sure what you mean here. As far as I have seen the only way to put waypoints into it is to put them in as custom POIs. In this case, deleting them is easy because when you load POIs it erases what is there and loads the new ones. So to get rid of your 400 geocaches, simply load a POI file with 1 point (0 might work but I havnt tried it).

 

I put several hundred caches in for our vacation out west. They were gone when I loaded a few dozen for an outing near home.

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Yes, WindChill, that is how custom POIs work. It's not WAYPOINTs (err, they may be called "favorites" in that model, I don't recall offhand) work. Waypoints in that family are created in the completely normal way, uploadable directly by tools like via GPSBabel (and thus tools that rely on it, like GSAK) or ExpertGPS, and can be edited on the front panel of the unit. None of these apply to custom POIs. Waypoints in other Garmin product lines can be deleted via a 'delete all' or sometimes by icon or sometimes by category. The C3x0's can have waypoints deleted only via a master reset.

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