Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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451 of 462 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very good GPS receiver. Could be better (for a price)., January 11, 2003
You can see other positive reviews of the etrex Legend here, so I won't rehash them. The short story is that the Legend is a pretty decent GPS unit that works pretty well.The base map included in the Legend only shows major highways and major streets. This is similar to the maps you get from a car rental agency. It's perfectly fine for doing rough navigation from city to city. At first, I tried using Rand McNally's StreetFinder and TripMaker Deluxe on my laptop with the Legend. The setup worked, but having to deal with the serial cable and using a laptop in the car was not very practical. After I've had my Legend a while, I had a chance to borrow and use a Vista. The owner of the Vista upgraded it with detailed street-detail maps from Garmin's MapSource "Metroguide USA" CD .... The detailed street map is a really nice feature -- especially because you can look up addresses. Having such a detailed map in a small portable device is a delight! I decided to get the Metroguide for myself. From my usage comparison, I found two things missing in the Legend compared to the top-end etrex Vista. First, the Legend has only 8 MB of expansion memory instead of the 24 MB in the Vista. This turns out to be a big issue for me, as I would like to have a complete metro guide of the greater Los Angeles area. With 8 MB, I could only fit 6 of the 18 MetroGuide map sets that I would have liked. This means, I am missing coverage of a large section stretching roughly from Compton to Long Beach to Lynwood to Cerritos to Irvine that I would have wanted. In contrast, the Vista held all of greater Los Angeles area, plus some San Francisco, San Diego, and Las Vegas. Second, the Vista has sensors for barometric altitude and magnetic compass heading. The Legend estimates altitude via GPS, and calculated heading based on your travel speed vector. If you are a trail-hiker, these sensors improve your navigation. Used as-is from the factory (i.e., only the American basemaps), the Legend is perfectly fine, and I was quite happy with it.
I could live without the Vista's sensors; But, having hit the 8 MB memory limit (trying to load Los Angeles), I would definitely go with the Vista now. The Metroguide maps sizes of other cities may or may not be an issue for you. Go to the Garmin website and use their MapSourec Map Viewer and count the number of "yellow squares" you'll need to cover you area of interest. Each square roughly represents between 500K to 1.5 MB of data (with the smaller, "dense" squares being toward the 1 MB to 1.5MB size). You'll find that most of the big cities will have enough squares to easily exceed the 8 MB of the Legend.
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105 of 105 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The best GPS in this price range, with one caveat:, January 15, 2005
If you are reading this, you are probably considering the Legend for its combination of price & features, along with the overall user satisfaction. That's why I chose it anyhow. ;)
Before I bought, I too read all of these amazon reviews and decided this GPS would be the best one for the money. ($136 at the time I bought it) I read the reviews of the Magellans, but they were pretty mixed, and their customer service NEVER got any kudos. It seemed like only 50% of their customers were happy out-of-the-box. I was initially attracted to them because they are said to retain satellite lock better than these low-end Garmins. But then I read that they have lower resolution displays, and that they're a lot bigger and heavier. A shame, since some of the medium Magellens had expandable SD memory...
Back to the Garmin Legend, bad news first: reception could be a bit stronger. If you follow Garmin's directions and hold the receiver flat under an unobstructed sky, you will always have excellent reception, a good lock, and good accuracy. (WAAS brings it from 27 ft. down to under 10 ft when you are covered by WAAS enabled satellites) But the signal gets degraded easily. For instance, if you don't hold it flat as you walk around outside, the accuracy generally drops from 10 ft to 50 ft. No big deal really. In the car, mounted to the dash there are never any problems. (check ebay for mounting accessories, unless you want to get gouged for the name-brand ones...)
The features are great, and are pretty easy to learn. The "clik stik' menu navigation is great. The display is very sharp and has great resolution. I can't believe how good it looks. Not that this matters much, but I also like the transluscent blue plastic. I haven't tried any of the external software yet, as it is pricey at around $100. (Garmin is crazy to ask this much for it. Do they think people don't realize how much it is going to cost? If they priced their extra maps at about $20 per country instead of $100+, they would sell a lot more of everything)
I have a friend at work who bought a Legend over a year ago. He just sold it on the bay and got most of his money back and put it towards a Vista C. He says the reception is drastically more reliable. He said that in his bathroom with a roof overhead, he was still able to pick up satellites and get good accuracy. With his Legend, he complained about losing satellite reception when he put it in a chest pocket of his jacket while riding dirtbikes in the desert. He likes that there is 24 MB of memory instead of 8. He likes the display. He also makes about 3X more money than I do, so he can afford a GPS that costs 3X as much as mine! (They're around $360 vs $140)
I went for a 3 mile hike in the forest preserve today and had it hung around my neck with the supplied strap. It worked great, even though it was about 5 degrees Farenheit today. The LCD was getting pretty slow, but everything worked very well.
Some notes if you're also considering the entry level (yellow) eTrex: The built-in USA basemap of the Legend is useful, but it doesn't cover down to street level. Realize that the basic etrex doesn't have this, so it will not be very useful for the car. It has major roads. Generally, anything with a state or interstate # will be on it. If you plan to use it only for outdoor activities where you will never need a map (topographic or street), the basic eTrex has the same hardware but with a smaller LCD screen. I know someone who has a yellow eTrex, and I think her main complaint is that it doesn't have the clik stik. She is an avid hiker and geocacher, and when she enters waypoints (manually, since it doesn't have PC interface capabilities) she doesn't bother to name them since it take so much longer without the clik-stik. She just leaves them numbered.
If you want more information, check out the groundspeak forums. Please do an honest search of the posts that are there before asking questions, as newbies show up and ask the same questions week after week. Someone has already asked your question, believe me.
Bottom line, if you have the dough, buy one of the higher-end Garmins for the reception and memory. If not, you will be very happy with this Legend as long as you realize its limitations.
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88 of 95 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Way To Go For GPS, June 28, 2001
The Etrex Line is by far the best handheld GPS for the money and size. There is a model that fits every user's needs and budget. Unless you need a magnetic compass and barometric altimeter, the Etrex Legend is probobly the best option. In addition to excellent waypoint and track management functions, the Legend features full mapping functions. The Unit includes a fairly detailed basemap of North America, but for more detailed mapping, data can be downloaded from a MapSource CD-ROM. These discs are availible in many flavors, from Waterway Details, to Topographical, to MetroGuide, which features address and business locating functions (Like Handheld Mapquest.com!)Downloading is easy, and thanks to the unit's high resolution LCD display, maps are suprisingly readable. The waterways disc features a complete database of aids to navigation, cataloging every bouy, daymark, and light in US waters. As far as GPS functions, the unit preforms beutifully, maintaining a good position fix under moderate tree cover, and inside of a car. Heavy foliage can create a problem, but the unit performs better than most handheld GPS do in this situation. WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) increases accuracy to within 9 feet in good reception areas! Although this is at the expense of battery life. To save power, leave WAAS turned off and you will still get accuracy within 20 feet. Because the unit uses 2 AA batteries instead of four, life is reduced; expect to change batteries at least every 14 hours, with the unit on continuously. Still, this is less often than my old garmin GPS 45, and that used four batts. The user interface is very friendly, intuitive, and powerful. This is a great achivment, usually powerful interfaces are not user-freindly and vice versa. It bears quite a similarity to Operating Systems such as Windows and Macintosh, so if you know how to use the computer you are reading this with, you should be right at home. Besides the buttons for Page, Power/Light, Find, Zoom In/Out, there is a "Click Stick" as a pointing device. It works like a joystick or the trackpoint on a laptop to control the cursor on the screen. Pusing it in is like a mouse-click. One strage note on this: it is placed on the left side of the unit. This means that operating in with your'e right thumb blocks the screen. Many people think this is a mistake, making one handed operation with the right hand near impossible, but it makes goos sense to me: operate the GPS in your left hand, while steering the boat with your left. It is not that hard to learn to use the GPS with your left hand (if youre righty), so you can have your right hand free for other things. In All, The Etrex Legend GPS is your best Buy in a handheld mapping GPS. If your'e looking for more features, check out the more expensive Etrex Vista and Garmin Gpsmap 76, or the very expensive handheld cartographic units, but if you just want a very good, inexpensive, handheld mapping GPS, The Legend is the best around.
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by Jack W. Peters
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