Anyone Have The Garmin Etrex Legend C?

[+huskytown]

I will be using this GPS in the car and for caching. I wanted to know what mapping software I will need for trips in the car and how many New England states does the Legend C hold?

 

Also, I have heard that topo maps for the Legend C are not recommended because of the small screen and area you can see at once? Is this true?

 

Thanks!

[+briansnat]

I will be using this GPS in the car and for caching. I wanted to know what mapping software I will need for trips in the car and how many New England states does the Legend C hold?

 

Also, I have heard that topo maps for the Legend C are not recommended because of the small screen and area you can see at once? Is this true?

 

Thanks!

Topo works great on the Legend and Legend C. The screen is no more an issue with topo than it is with regular road maps. You can pan out to see a wider area, or in to focus on a smaller area.

 

If you want to use your unit primarily for hiking and geocaching in the woods, I strongly recommend topo. If your prime use for the GPS will be to find your way around town and for urban/suburban geocaching, City Select is the better choice.

 

Another issue is that in many areas, City Select takes up A LOT more memory than Topo. See below.

 

I use both on my 60CS and flip between them depending on my needs. With the 24 megs on the Legend, this might not be an option.

 

23.6 megs of map coverage in New England for City Select

 

24.0 megs of map coverage in New England for Topo

Edited April 27, 2005 by briansnat

[+huskytown]

I will be using this GPS in the car and for caching. I wanted to know what mapping software I will need for trips in the car and how many New England states does the Legend C hold?

 

Also, I have heard that topo maps for the Legend C are not recommended because of the small screen and area you can see at once? Is this true?

 

Thanks!

Topo works great on the Legend and Legend C. The screen is no more an issue with topo than it is with regular road maps. You can pan out to see a wider area, or in to focus on a smaller area.

 

If you want to use your unit primarily for hiking and geocaching in the woods, I strongly recommend topo. If your prime use for the GPS will be to find your way around town and for urban/suburban geocaching, City Select is the better choice.

 

Another issue is that in many areas, City Select takes up A LOT more memory than Topo. See below.

 

I use both on my 60CS and flip between them depending on my needs. With the 24 megs on the Legend, this might not be an option.

 

23.6 megs of map coverage in New England for City Select

 

24.0 megs of map coverage in New England for Topo

Other than getting a different GPS with more memory, are there any other options for the Legend C? Is there an option to d/l only sections of New England for Topo and City Select to conserve memory?

[+briansnat]

Is there an option to d/l only sections of New England for Topo and City Select to conserve memory?

 

Yes you can. You can select certain areas to cover with each.

 

If you live in a major metropolitan area, City Select is memory intensive. It lists many thousands of businesses as well as roads. In less populated areas it takes up far less memory. Actuall less than Topo in some areas.

 

For instance, the coverage I had shown above was for City Select in Massachussets and surrounding areas. You can see it doesn't cover much.

 

But if I move away from the populated areas and you'll see that City Select covers far more in the same amout of memory. In this case I can get all of Maine, Vt and NH and a good portion of NY state in 23.9 megs of memory with City Select. You can get even more if you don't use auto routing.

 

Edited April 28, 2005 by briansnat

[peter]

The screen is no more an issue with topo than it is with regular road maps. You can pan out to see a wider area, or in to focus on a smaller area.

Brian and I have a different view on this issue. I find that for the way I use street maps the small screen size is not a big deal at all but that for my typical uses of topo maps it is a serious shortcoming.

 

When using streetmaps I'm generally looking for a specific address, road name, or intersection. Using a paper map (even if I have one that's detailed enough to include all streets), this involves multiple steps - looking up the street name in the map index and getting the coordinate (e.g. K-8), then turning the map over and hunting through the tiny print to locate the right street. In comparison using a GPS unit with streetmaps makes this very easy - I enter the address or intersection, hit Find, and up pops a map centered on the right spot along with information of what direction and distance it is from my current location. Furthermore, the streetmap on the GPS includes lots of business and other locations directly so it's actually much more useful than any paper streetmap of that area. And with auto-routing models, like the LegendC, it'll also tell me how to get there in a reasonable way with beeps and arrow prompts as I proceed.

 

OTOH, when using a topo map it's generally because I'm trying to find the best route to take based on the topology of an area - i.e. how to avoid having to climb terrain that's too steep, or needing to cross a river where it would be unsafe, etc. For that I need to be able to see a significant area all at once to keep the big picture in mind (i.e. where I'm headed and the overall 3D nature of the area), but I also need to see enough detail to know where any cliffs, river crossings, etc. are located. That's easy with a regular paper USGS map, which is also far more detailed than Garmin's US Topo, but much less so with the small screen of a handheld GPS. Using the small screen, whenever I zoom out far enough to see the whole area I lose all of the necessary detail, whereas if I zoom in far enough for all the contour lines to show then I can only see a very small area at a time. For that reason I still find the large paper topo maps to be far more useful than any handheld GPS topo map.

 

So overall I find CitySelect to be superior to paper streetmaps but still find paper topo maps to be more useful than Garmin's US Topo.

 

Since your planned uses and needed features of the maps may well vary, I'd suggest you use Garmin's MapViewer at

http://www.garmin.com/cartography to look at a few areas with which you're familiar before making a puchase decision.