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It's only a minor inconvenience, though if I were purchasing a GPS receiver today, I would probably fork out the extra money for Garmin's Legend HCx or Vista HCx, which accept micro SD cards. If I travel outside of my usual romping grounds, I need to upload new maps to the device, and then switch back to my usual mapset afterward. I have been (almost) completely satisfied with this product. The only thing holding me back from a five star rating is the limited internal memory (24 MB).
However, the batteries continue to drain when the unit is turned off, so unless the user pulls the batteries out before setting it aside for a few days, the batteries will be dead upon return.This unit has a lot of features, and not a lot of controls. I'd be happier with fewer features so that common operations would be faster. I got this to replace an older Garmin that died. As a result, navigating the menus is clumsy and slow. Keep the common case fast. After having the etrex Venture for a couple years, I can say I overall liked the older model better. My main issue is battery life, and my second is clumsy interface.Battery life is ok when the unit is in use.
It's good if you're looking for something basic and inexpensive. I was worried about the color screen draining the batteries but I've had the same batteries in it for a month and they aren't even on their last bar yet. This is a nice basic gps. I use it for geocaching and I love it.
Just remember to use geocaching dot com since it is set up to easily upload geocaches right to your Garmin. The joystick that you use quite a lot for selections and manuerving happens to be set-up for the left thumb. The Venture is sturdy but the cover is a nice snug fit and gives some added protection and a belt clip. It also doesn't have a compass feature for when you are standing still but this is not really a problem and should not be a deciding factor for you since as soon as you start moving you get your orientation.For me the one thing to consider is do you hike/camp a lot OR do you think you would want to try geocaching.
Features include a Geocache mode where you can easily upload to your Venture geocaches from geocaching dot com. Also I recommend the Garmin cover noted in the product listing. I have wanted a handheld GPS for some time to do geocaching and for having with me when hiking. The Venture HC is an excellent entry-level handheld GPS. Living my entire life in a right-handed built world, I quite enjoyed this. I knew that limitation coming in, but if you think you are going to want to have a lot of map layers you probably do not want this.
Note 5 stars if no need for an SD card. The cool thing about geocaching is that it is not just for state and national parks. And it is something the whole family can do. It is a great way not to get lost hiking but also to discover a lot of cool areas where you live. Not to say for the 90% of people out there not left-handed that it will be hard to use, just pointed it out since it is so unusual (and nice for a lefty).What it doesn't have is an SD card feature. So far I have mostly gone to ones around my house and I already have discovered a few parks I did not know existed. It has a nice bright adjustable screen and lots of easy to use features.
There are a lot of caches right in urban areas. However I downloaded some free Texas topo maps (quite cool just do a web search) and I could only download the topos for Central Texas in the 22 mb (avaiable storage). It has a trip computer, remembers routes, and you can easily set waypoints and delete them.It also has some other useful features, a basic calculator, calender, stopwatch, fishing feature (given your location and date it lists the best times for fishing) and a celestial calender with sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset.It also, for a lefty has a neat feature. I thought this was no big deal and for basic geocaching it isn't.
The basemap in this price range GPS does not get you a detailed map. We used the data page with the pointer and that always took us right to the cache. I bought this GPS mainly to do some personal geocaching for when my grandsons came for a week visit. However, that really was not an issue for finding a cache. Maybe for the advanced geocachers, a more detailed basemap might be required, but this GPS should be fine for the entry or intermediate user. It is simple to navigate the pages and set waypoints and the accuracy was very good and got the guys usually within six feet of the point I had hidden a cache. And some of these were under heavy tree cover and it worked excellent there as well.
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