Dr Gadget - Gadget Shop - Garmin eTrex GPS Personal Navigator

	List Price: Our Price: £59.02 Your Save: £ ( % ) Availability: Manufacturer: Garmin
Average Customer Rating:
Batteries Included: 0 Batteries: 2 Binding: Electronics Brand: Garmin EAN: 0753759017026 Is Autographed: 0 Is Fragile: 0 Is Memorabilia: 0 Label: Garmin Manufacturer: Garmin Model: 010-00190-06 Publisher: Garmin Studio: Garmin
Accessories Garmin eTrex Handlebar Mount Bracket Garmin PC interface cable (RS232 serial port connector) - not applicable to Geko 101 Garmin - Case for GPS Garmin PC interface cable with cigarette lighter adapter Garmin eTrex Dash Mount Bracket
Related Items Garmin - Case for GPS Garmin PC interface cable (RS232 serial port connector) - not applicable to Geko 101 GPS the Easy Way (2nd Edition) USB to RS232 - USB Converter Cable Garmin eTrex Handlebar Mount Bracket
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: For most, the hassle will outweigh the utility Comment: This is my first GPS product and I hate it. It has lots of features that I don't need. The three features that I do need; reliability, good battery life and clear mapping, it singularly fails to deliver. (Granted the last is partly down to the OS). Getting the maps onto it requires more passwords and registrations than you can shake a stick at. First time around, after I had spent hours struggling with this, it transpired that the machine was faulty and had to go back. They replaced it but forgot to tell me that this messes up all of those registrations etc. I'm no technophobe, and my son is a real junior gamer. He reckons that even the simple games on it were difficult to make sense of. This was a present, otherwise it would be sold-on a.s.a.p.. I guess that they are all like this. I am not going to try another. Customer Rating: Summary: Buy the Etrex 'H' !!! Comment: The newer Etrex 'H' model has a much better receiver than the older model. It is all you need for basic navigation. Buy a serial lead and a serial to USB converter like Keyspan to connect to your PC, plan your route in a digital map program like Tracklogs and then download the waypoints. Just use Goto to go from one waypoint to the next....easy if you label your waypoints in a meaningful way. Customer Rating: Summary: Love it Comment: Use this mainly to navigate on grid referances, and havent gone wrong yet. I find it a bit time consuming inputing the referances as waypoints but this is mainly down to my technophobe status, as apose to a product shortfall it does eat the batterys but so do they all if you have them on as long as i do!!! Really for this price you don't need anything else if you just need to know where you are and where your going. Customer Rating: Summary: Function over Fashion Comment: I will start by saying I bought one of these in 2002ish (when they were &150). It does everything I need, i.e. give me my OS position which I then translate using a map. The colour is great to avoid losing it. The constrast is sufficient to display the info correctly. It gives a reasonably accurate altitude. The only downside is the RS232 interface.....where as my GPS has lasted, I have gone through about 4 laptops in that time none have which serial cables now.....but to be honest I do not upload/download....I say again it gives me my OS position and thats all I want. If you want gimmicky colour go for a different model but beware of shorter battery life on the hills! Customer Rating: Summary: Do I recommend the Garmin eTrex? An unconditional YES. Comment: When my father bought me one of these back in 2000 as a gift I was skeptical; by then I'd heard of GPS technology but didn't reckon I had any need for it. Also I was put off from reading the instruction manual because it seemed written in a style that somehow reminded me of Homer Simpson, i.e. written with the lowest common denominator in mind, fairly low-brow, and therefore overly simple. The first Garmin eTrex I had was subjected to extreme conditions in an unexpected Force 8 gale in the English Channel. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it may have contributed in a big way to saving my life and that of my crew. I wasn't thinking of relying on it when we left harbour but - just for safety - I put in a waypoint at the harbour entrance. A few hours later we were mid-channel in my 25ft sailing boat, in pitch dark, when we were rammed by a much larger sailing vessel sailing with - apparently - no one on watch. Following this near-disaster an unexpected gale blew up and, with a damaged boat, we needed to get back to harbour - fast - in extremely challenging sailing conditions. Visibility was almost zero and we had just the reciprocal on our compass to navigate by: this is where the eTrex became invaluable. It showed the harbour entrance to be at least 40° further E of where our dead-reckoning would have suggested: we had not made sufficient allowance for tidal streams and considerable leeway in high winds; plus we had no way of calculating how far we'd drifted off course in the confused time following the collision. Since I was skipper it was my call and I chose to sail to the waypoint I'd put on the eTrex at the harbour entrance. This decision was rewarded by making a perfect landfall after a very taxing night - trying to keep the damaged boat sailing in difficult weather. We sailed into the shelter of our home harbour in the early morning light, completely exhausted but all extremely relieved. After this I was converted to GPS. I really got to grips with using the eTrex in all manner of ways and situations: one needs to be able to work effectively with it even when cold, tired, frightened and stressed. However, there is a creeping danger that we may come to rely exclusively upon GPS at the expense of being able to exercise more traditional navigational skills such as dead reckoning with the use of the log. What happens, for example, if somehow you lose the eTrex overboard, or if it simply fails for some reason? Rigorous logbook entries need to be updated at least hourly with all relevant information: in my opinion it would be complacent to rely solely on GPS; the more navigation input sources the better, I say. Unfortunately as a result of the abominable weather experienced in that gale the eTrex was exposed to huge amounts of salt water: I'd had the eTrex on a lanyard around my neck. The unit failed a little while after we reached harbour. Happily Garmin were persuaded to replace it for free. One day about a year later I looked into my kitbag and found that - somehow - during my travels, something violent must have happened and caused the eTrex screen to crack. Immediately I went to a shop and bought an identical replacement: this one I've had for several years now. Just a few days ago I bought another eTrex (this is now my 4th Garmin eTrex!) from Amazon as a back-up unit since I'm planning a sailing trip from Finland to the UK in the summer and consider a spare GPS unit as vital (just in case!). In summer 2007 I was sailing alone in the rock-strewn Finnish Archipelago when a terrific rain squall broke out and visibility was reduced to a few meters. The eTrex proved invaluable at showing me my position - by means of instant GPS fix - relative to where the rocks were shown on the chart. In this part of the world there are magnetic anomalies in the geology and in some areas compass readings can be totally unreliable, with errors of around 30° - leading to the real possibility of sailing the boat up onto a reef or shoal. I was caught like this once: I noticed breaking waves several hundreds of meters ahead indicating rocks where there shouldn't have been any. Only later I realised that I'd failed to read the notice on the chart explaining the possibility of magnetic anomalies affecting compass readings: if it had happened at night the crash as I hit the rocks would have been dramatic. Having GPS is a huge asset and serves to keep one's nerves and pulse rate soothed. The Garmin eTrex has proved valuable when calibrating the Raytheon log in my boat: it gives reasonably accurate and reliable distance readings for calibration purposes. I have successfully used the eTrex while flying to determine air speed. And I have used eTrex while driving my car and found that the speedo reads slightly less than the actual car speed according to GPS: this is good to know with respect to traffic speed cameras. I have not had any problems with battery power. I turn the eTrex on for only relatively short bursts of a few minutes just to take readings. In this way one set of batteries can easily last a whole summer. I have looked at the more expensive models but - at this stage of development (2008) - I really do not see any great advantage of spending more money. As someone has pointed out here WAAS only works in N and S America: so why pay for software that one can't use outside of N & S America? I haven't tried using PC cable. Loading waypoints manually has not been a big problem. Do I recommend the Garmin eTrex? An unconditional YES! For the relatively small cash layout you buy yourself a hugely valuable - & in my case vital - piece of safety kit. More Reviews
Editorial Reviews: The eTrex takes the best features of a 12 parallel channel GPS receiver and put them into a six ounce package. The result is a unit that will literally fit in the palm of your hand. The eTrex? takes the best features of a 12 parallel channel GPS receiver and put them into a six ounce package that is only four inches high and two inches wide. The result is a unit that will literally fit in the palm of your hand. Besides its small size, mariners and outdoorsmen will likely notice the sleek design of the eTrex. All buttons are located on either side of the unit, allowing for simple, one-handed operation that won't obstruct your view of the display. In fact, the eTrex features only five operator buttons for the ultimate in user-friendly design. Thanks to its bright yellow case, the eTrex will be hard to misplace and easy to find in any boat or backpack. The eTrex is completely waterproof so it can take an accidental splash or dunk in the water and still continue to perform. Inside the eTrex, you will find the proven performance of a 12 parallel channel GPS receiver that will run for 18 hours on just two AA batteries. No need to worry about dense tree canopy with this unit, the eTrex will continue to maintain a tight satellite lock even while operating in forest-like conditions. The eTrex will store up to 500 user waypoints with graphic icons and boasts GARMIN's exclusive TracBack? feature that will reverse your track log and help you navigate your way back home. In addition, the eTrex uses animated graphics that will help you identify your marked waypoints quickly and easily.