magellan that hooks to a visor vs others

[FCI (Family of Cache Investigators)]

Hi.. I am looking to purchase a GPS but ,I as everyone else is confused as to what to get.. I have a visor deluxe and I am wanting to know if anyone has tried the GPS companion for the visor. If so how does it compare to a regular GPS of whatever make. Would it be worth getting?

 

thanks for taking the ime to answer my question

[Scabbers]

Hi Mike ... I have the Magellin GPS snap-on for Palm V. I started geocaching about a month ago & have found 5/5 attempts so far. Since Palm & Visor both use Palm OS, I would expect similar performance for you. I'm actually quite amazed at the performance. I've had excellent accuracy, even for caches where others have reported signal loss under heavy treecover. My last find was dead-on accurate (reading 0.0 ft at the find) the average seems to be within about 10' - 15' of the cache.

The downside is that your Visor/Palm is not waterproof and not rugged. You could easily drop it into a creek/lake, etc. I'm always thinking about limited battery life (10 hrs for the GPS, ??? for your PDA - whichever is less) Also, the included mapping software is not great. Mine actually runs 2 programs ... one for street maps (poor) and another for navigation/hiking (OK). I use the NavComp software for geocaching, which seems to work fine. Also, mine has no WAAS capability, no averaging and limited waypoint memory.

All that said, it has worked fine, but I'm now in the market for an upgrade ... probably a Garmin GPS V.

[+Wander Lost]

Check out this thread in the GPS Units & Software fourm. It goes into this subject pretty well.

 

I have the Visor/Magellan combo and it works well for my needs.

 

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people??

[Sea Wolf]

I use the Visor Prism with the Magellan Companion. So far, I like it!

 

My only complaint is that there is not a program out there that will do everything I want it to, IE, store cache info, sort caches, navigate with the GPS, search for closest caches, map, etc.

[+M-D-M Explorations]

About the only complaint I have with the Companion and my Visor is the fact you can not get waypoints into or out of it other than manually. I know the stand alone GPSr units have that ability. And with the power of a PDA I am surprised that they have not gotten software yet to allow the convenience of manipulating the waypoints easily.

 

M-D-M Explorations

MrSki and DogMa

40º 07.874'N

88º 11.647'W

[+Shoebox]

I was set to buy a unit for my visor when someone pointed out that the visor might not be that sturdy. I would be taking it across rough terrain and it might get wet from time to time. The GPSs seem to be much more sturdy and water resistant. Just something to think about. As it turned out, I took a good tumble on a patch of ice with my Magellan 330 last winter and I was very glad it wasn't the visor.