Garmin eTrex Venture HC Portable Navigator

Great value and works great.

First the pros. The satelite lock on is incredible multiple locks and ast even inside a building. The software is great, the display is bright although there isnt a way i found out to keep your contrast setting and have to keep setting it up on start up. Cons. If you want this GPS for walking down the street of light to medium trail use then its for you this is just because they charge you an arm and leg for topo software. The nav. button is a bit quirky nothing unmanageable but is still can be frustrating. I own a Garmin for my car and it developed dark spots on the display and not even Garmin knew how they got there so I hope this wont be a problem. Please buy any Garmin model they are the best on the market right now. Stay away from Ma....an.

Can't beat this one for the price. Wish the backlight would stay at the brightest setting, but otherwise product works well. We use this for geocaching and it works well.

This Garmin Venture HC is a good handheld GPS for an entry level product which I use for hiking and geocaching. It worked right out of the box, connected to the PC just fine, and gets me very close to the coordinates. Color display is nice, has many more features than I'll ever use. I expected more detail from the base map installed / shipped in the unit, and was very disappointed. I ended up buying the add-on map package and installing that to get the level of road detail I wanted. The map package retails for almost as much as the GPS unit! Internal memory is OK for looking locally, but is very limited (requires a PC to load different maps for driving more than about 100 miles.) Still, for hiking it's a great product and it was tough to beat the WalMart price. It was not intended to be a dashboard GPS, and it's probably better to buy one of each kind rather than try to get one GPS to do both jobs well.

I got this GPS unit from Walmart at over a $30 savings from their closest competetor! The GPS works great for Geocaching which is my main use for it. All the reviews you read about the weak topo-maps that come with the unit are completely true; however, you don't really need them (if you're a planner) for most geocaching adventures. If you want to look at something besides a waypoint on a yellow screen, your best bet is to spend some extra money and get the package that comes with the USA-topo. I say that if you're a beginner though, go for the best value. Topo-maps will be great after you've proven yourself as a geocacher for a year or more(and you've outlasted the "fad" stage). By that time, you'll have like dropped this bad boy in a river or something anyway. And if you haven't, you can sell it to a friend that you hook into geocaching when you upgrade. Shortened review - It gets you close to the caches, but it's not going to find them for you.