Groundspeak Portal

I know topics on this are often discussed on Geocaching.com, but I seem to be having trouble getting into the forum tonight and I was hoping to get some quick advice since we will probably shop for one tomorrow.

We are on vacation and stopped at a zoo today in Florida.  At some point in the day, my GPSr disappeared, either it fell off our stroller without our noticing it or someone walked off with it when we turned our backs to look at and/or feed the animals.  We left our contact information with the zoo, but I am not hopeful of its return at this point.  Even if they do contact us, backtracking 200 miles to pick it up is not feasible, so we would have to wait until they could ship it to us and we had hoped to do some more waymarking/geocaching during the next week of our trip.  We are considering stopping at a store tomorrow and seeing what is available for an inexpensive replacement.  Although I would love to upgrade to a Colorado or other device capable of WhereIgo, I cannot justify it in our budget right now.  I am hoping for something less than $100 as a stop-gap until I can afford to go for something more high-end.  After that I would let my soon-to-be six year old son use it while we waymark and geocache.

Although we primarily do waymarking, we still do geocaching when it coincides with the waymarking.  We are also slowly working our way through the DeLorme pages and counties of Wisconsin (about 60% complete).

Any advice would be appreciated.  Thanks!

Garmin eTrex Venture HC.
It's yellow, it's got a color screen, it's got a USB connection, it's got their high-sensitivity sensor, it's geocaching friendly, runs for a long time on 2 AA batteries.

It's not expandable, though.

PriceGrabber.com shows prices from $132.19 up to $199.00.

Can't argue with this recommendation too much!
I started with Magellan and had several - stolen, broken, lost.  The low end models worked well for me, and it was cheap to replace. 

But, then I finally sprang for a Garmin Colorado.  While it has a few drawbacks, it instantly put me into the realm of true, convenient paperless caching.  It works great for my waymarks, too.  Now, if I can just hang on to it . . . .

silverquill:

Can't argue with this recommendation too much!
But, then I finally sprang for a Garmin Colorado.  While it has a few drawbacks, it instantly put me into the realm of true, convenient paperless caching.  It works great for my waymarks, too.  Now, if I can just hang on to it . . . .

From dealnews.com:
Best Buy via eBay DailyDeal offers the Garmin Colorado 300 Handheld GPS Navigation System for $229.99 with free shipping. Excluding rebates, it's the lowest total price we've seen by $42. Features include a waterproof housing, 240x400 color LCD display, 384 MB of internal memory, SD card slot, USB connectivity, built-in worldwide basemap, and 15 hours of battery life. Deal ends April 21.

0ccam:

From dealnews.com:
Best Buy via eBay DailyDeal offers the Garmin Colorado 300 Handheld GPS Navigation System for $229.99 with free shipping. Excluding rebates, it's the lowest total price we've seen by $42. Features include a waterproof housing, 240x400 color LCD display, 384 MB of internal memory, SD card slot, USB connectivity, built-in worldwide basemap, and 15 hours of battery life. Deal ends April 21.

This sounds like a good deal, but I wouldn't call it inexpensive.

I got a good price on EBay for the yellow Garmin for my Mom a while back. At the time, one of the cigarette companies was giving them away for points, and people got them and didn't know what to do with them. I did a search on Garmin GPS Handheld on EBay, and got quite a few under 100$ My only caution would be make sure it was barely used, or new. I put so much wear and tear on my GPS's that I replace them every 18-24 months.

globetrotters.us:

0ccam:

From dealnews.com:
Best Buy via eBay DailyDeal offers the Garmin Colorado 300 Handheld GPS Navigation System for $229.99 with free shipping. Excluding rebates, it's the lowest total price we've seen by $42. Features include a waterproof housing, 240x400 color LCD display, 384 MB of internal memory, SD card slot, USB connectivity, built-in worldwide basemap, and 15 hours of battery life. Deal ends April 21.

This sounds like a good deal, but I wouldn't call it inexpensive.

You're right; I was responding to the previous post. Most of pricing in this thread is irrelevant to the OP, because he's out in the field and internet mail order won't help him.

globetrotters.us:

I put so much wear and tear on my GPS's that I replace them every 18-24 months.

My main GPSr, acquired in 2006, is a 60Cx. But the school where my wife teaches has an auction every year, so about 9 months before that auction, I buy an inexpensive new one and use it for car-to-cache, leaving the 60Cx in the dash mount (which gets hidden under the seat). When the auction rolls around, the inexpensive GPS gets donated (to my geocaching kits which go) to the auction.

Saves wear on the really good GPS, and lets me play with some of the other GPS options out there. That's what I was basing my initial advice on.

 like my magellan explorist 500 (we have 2).....

the new model is $250 at wally world, and most other retailers.....

the key to this deal is that it comes with the map software.....

I use a Garmin eTrex. I think you can get them off eBay now for ninety cents.

Redneck Parrotheads:

I use a Garmin eTrex. I think you can get them off eBay now for ninety cents.

Found some of my favourite caches that way... you know, before micros showed up LOL.

BQ

Just a follow up to this.  I settled on a Garmin H.  It has high sensitivity and came in under $100.  So far it seems to work well for my needs, but I haven't had a chance to run it on a geocache hunt, yet.

I'm nowhere close to going paperless, yet, so I figure it should be good for a while until I can save up some leisure cash for something more high-end.

To be honest I had been frustrated with my Magelan as it often hung up during its initial satellite acquisition process requiring me to pull a battery to force a restart.  Some days I had to do this 4 or 5 times before I could get it to work.

Now to actually start posting all the waymarks I have pictures and coordinates for after 2 weeks of vacation (although I only spent about 5 days waymarking/geocaching.)

I assume you mean the eTrex H, right?

Seems like the best option following your reasoning. Good job!

So what model are you saving for?

0ccam:

I assume you mean the eTrex H, right?

Seems like the best option following your reasoning. Good job!

So what model are you saving for?

Yes, that's the one.  It was cheaper than the $99 listed in the link - I don't remember how much cheaper, but at least $10.  So far I like it.  I even played around with doing some GPS Track art while I was watching the grandkids play and I think it will work better than the Magellan did for that.  I haven't gotten around to doing a waymark, yet, but I've been toying with various possibilities. One I really want to do is to go out in the middle of one of our frozen lakes during the winter and do a track there, but I was too busy this winter.

I'm torn on what higher end model to go for.  I would really love to go for something like a pocket PC or blackberry or the like with appropriate GPS capabilities, but I'm concerned about how rugged it is.  My GPSr tends to take a beating and the Magellan and Garmin are pretty sturdy.  I've broken a Pocket PC and I wasn't even carrying it around in the woods looking for a geocache.

Because of that I'm probably leaning towards the Colorado.  When I have three hundred dollars saved for it, then I'll probably do some more research.

onfire4jesus:

Yes, that's the one.  It was cheaper than the $99 listed in the link - I don't remember how much cheaper, but at least $10.  So far I like it.  I even played around with doing some GPS Track art while I was watching the grandkids play and I think it will work better than the Magellan did for that.  I haven't gotten around to doing a waymark, yet, but I've been toying with various possibilities. One I really want to do is to go out in the middle of one of our frozen lakes during the winter and do a track there, but I was too busy this winter.

I'm torn on what higher end model to go for.  I would really love to go for something like a pocket PC or blackberry or the like with appropriate GPS capabilities, but I'm concerned about how rugged it is.  My GPSr tends to take a beating and the Magellan and Garmin are pretty sturdy.  I've broken a Pocket PC and I wasn't even carrying it around in the woods looking for a geocache.

Because of that I'm probably leaning towards the Colorado.  When I have three hundred dollars saved for it, then I'll probably do some more research.

If I may suggest another option, I just got a Delorme PN-40 back in December and love it. Previously I was using a Magellan Explorist 500. It was nice, but the Delorme blows it away in my mind, hands down. The price is usually around $300 on amazon.com and has true paperless geocaching features. It comes with Topo USA 7.0 (version 8.0 is scheduled for mid-May and the GPS ships with a coupon for a free upgrade) to give you topo features, major trails, and road routing. With the new firmware upgrade, I can use the Send-to-GPS feature for single caches, and their upcoming geocaching widget will allow me to send a whole query

For an additional $30, you can get a subscription to Delorme's map service giving you access to B&W and color aerial imagery (1-meter resolution) for nearly the entire country, high-res imagery (1 foot resolution) for select major cities, NOAA coastal water maps, and USGS quads. For the color imagery, think of having Google Earth on your GPS. It's way cool! I'll also mention that their tech support is second to none. They are very active on their own forums and also participate in the geocaching.com forums.

Rayman:

If I may suggest another option, I just got a Delorme PN-40 back in December and love it. Previously I was using a Magellan Explorist 500. It was nice, but the Delorme blows it away in my mind, hands down. The price is usually around $300 on amazon.com and has true paperless geocaching features. It comes with Topo USA 7.0 (version 8.0 is scheduled for mid-May and the GPS ships with a coupon for a free upgrade) to give you topo features, major trails, and road routing. With the new firmware upgrade, I can use the Send-to-GPS feature for single caches, and their upcoming geocaching widget will allow me to send a whole query

For an additional $30, you can get a subscription to Delorme's map service giving you access to B&W and color aerial imagery (1-meter resolution) for nearly the entire country, high-res imagery (1 foot resolution) for select major cities, NOAA coastal water maps, and USGS quads. For the color imagery, think of having Google Earth on your GPS. It's way cool! I'll also mention that their tech support is second to none. They are very active on their own forums and also participate in the geocaching.com forums.

That sounds cool, but does it do WhereIgo?  I'd really like to get into that.

onfire4jesus:

That sounds cool, but does it do WhereIgo?  I'd really like to get into that.

Unfortunately, no. That's probably it's only drawback. I guess my only recommendation would be to get a Windows mobile device, but I would be leery of carrying something like that around where it could get dropped.

see...all this gps does this, that gps does something else.....oh for the days when they all did the same thing....none of us got left behind cause our equipment wasnt capable of doing that....is it just me or can you kinda tell whos using their 'car' gps for caching? seems like their accuracy sucks big time.....realize they are for trucking the 'open' highway at high speeds, not tiptoing through the woods...