Looking at a Summit and a Vista "H" models

[BelchFire]

I'm interested in the H models and I would only buy the Summit or Vista for the internal compass. But there seems to be a large price difference for the expandable memory feature of the Vista. I'm not really interested in mapping, but I can tell I'm going to want to play around with it. How much of a map can I load into 24MB in the Summit model?

[jmundinger]

It depends on what part of the country you want to load. Large metropolitan areas take a lot of memory. I can get all of Montana (MetroGuide) into the 24mb on my Legend C and have room left over. The greater metropolitan Chicago area would consume about 12 mb.

[+Klatch]

I'm not really interested in mapping, <snip>

You will be. I suggest spending the extra dollars now, instead of needing to upgrade to a new unit shortly.

[+island_hunter]

I just purchased the Vista HCx because of the High-sensitivity receiver and the expandable memory. Last night on ebay, I picked up a 1 GB MicroSD card for $12.00 US including shipping! With this card I can put most or all of the country on it in one shot. With smaller memories you have to delete and add new maps everytime you are going somewhere new. Hope this helps. island_hunter

[+Miragee]

I started with the Garmin Vista and soon found how useful the auto-routing maps were. I upgraded to a Vista C which has been great for more than two years now. The 24 MB of memory has been adequate for me and for how much I travel. However, I just upgraded to the Vista HCx because I wanted the ability to have 1000 waypoints again . . . like I had with that original monochrome Vista.

 

Get what you can afford, but keep in mind, each time you upgrade, you lose some money on the GPSr you originally bought and now want to sell . . . unless you like to collect GPS units.

[SergZak]

I would seriously consider the Vista HCx or one of the other eTrex "x" units. 24MB may seem like quite a bit but realize that you can get a 1GB mSD card for $10-$15. If you got the 24MB fixed memory unit, you'll kick yourself if you ever need more than that for map storage since you'll have to purchase a new unit to "upgrade".

Edited August 29, 2007 by SergZak