eTrex Summit HC a good choice?

[+Aye-Ch]

Yippee! For my birthday I received a eTrex Summit HC with Topo Maps. I've done a bit of reading the the forums, and I rarely see this model motioned. Does anyone have experience with it? I had been using a Garmin nuvi 350 for my first 300 finds and it served me fine (LOVE the street navigation), but I'm looking for something that is more reliable under tree cover (and any handheld will have better battery life, be sturdier than the nuvi). Also the Summit has an electronic compass - does anyone actually use this? I can exchange the Summit for something else if this model isn't a good choice, and I don't have to stay in the Summit price range. Any suggestions?

[+briansnat]

Since you already have a Nuvi, for driving, your Summit HC will do the job quite nicely.

[+coggins]

Happy birthday Aye-Ch! It was a good gift, and as mentioned, will complement a Nüvi 350 quite well. The compass is handy, as it will point to a cache while standing still, while units without need to be moving to work.

[Keystone]

I am moving this thread from the Geocaching Topics forum to the GPS and Technology forum.

[+admo1972]

I too am looking at the SummitHC and the VistaHCx.

Pro Vista:

Expandable memory

Longer Battery life

 

Pro Summit:

Much cheaper

 

The 24MB on the Summit is sizable enough to store a bunch of topo maps. My current B&W Vista has 24 MB of map memory, and can store all of NJ, parts of SW New York, parts of NE Pennsylvania, and the Asheville, North Carolina area, which leads me to thinking I can get by without the expandable memory. I also have a car GPS, so autorouting is not necessary for me.

[+wasted]

I have a summit hc and love it, I also have a vista hcx and IMO the difference between the two isnt as drastic as is seems, for what its worth I made some comments of my opinion between the two in another thread...

 

I also have a summit hc that my kids use and is also a work horse/back-up for my hcx and theres no noticable difference in performance between the two... if fact if you put them in a case so you couldnt see the color difference or the labels you couldnt tell them apart with their basic operation...

 

as everyone already knows, the two obvious things I've noticed that the hc falls short in comparison to the hcx are its memory and battery life and even those arent as drastic as they sound... the summit hc has 24mb of memory, I live in wisconsin and I have IBYCUS's maps on my hc and the whole state of wisconsin is just a little over 28mb, so I can load almost the whole state of wisconsin on it, plenty of area unless I plan on an overnight trip somewhere, and even if the situation arises I can reconfigure the maps to whatever I need and download them in about 2 minutes, and then just download the original map when I'm done, so the "limited memory" isnt much of an issue to me...

 

battery life could be better, if I have one gripe with the comparison that would be it, but only when comparing the hc against the hcx, it still isnt bad and wouldnt be an issue at all if I didnt know that the hcx got as good a battery life as it does

 

I was looking to go cheaper with the back-up too, although it works good for street use my summit hc is meant mainly for offroad use so I dont need auto routing and all the other "street" features and it gets a little beat up by the kids so I didnt need one that costs a fortune either, I found them for $121 with free shipping and was going to pick up the venture hc myself but my kids like the compass so I got the summit hc instead, walmart had them for $148 which is still over $70 cheaper than any vista hcx I'd run across when I bought the hc

[+Aye-Ch]

Thank you everyone for your comments. This is such a helpful community!

[+chuck6277]

I realize that my old style E-trex Summit (I am talking 1999 or 2000 version with no internal memory or basemap: just a blank screen and waypoints) is quite different than the Summit HC in many ways, but they do share the electronic compass. I use that feature on virtually every cache I find. I'm by no means a prolific geocacher as I usually limit my hunts to those caches in the woods or along hiking trails and rarely have the time to get out there. But when I do get the chance, I just have to stop every once and a while (either to clear my head or because my path is blocked by thornbushes) and rethink things. It is nice not having to pull out my "real compass" and compare it to my GPS (which is what I have to do if I use my old style Legend).