Garmin eTrex Vista HCx - 2.4 in. Handheld GPS Receiver

I purchased my Vista as an upgrade for my Legend and have been very happy with it. The click stick and intuitive menus make navigating the screens and entering waypoints a breeze. I love its light weight (5.3 oz) and compact size, as it fits comfortably in my front pocket, enabling me to take it pretty much everywhere (even to the mall to mark the location of my car in the lot).

The display has nice resolution and is easy to read, despite its small size (2" x 1"). Like all LCD screens, it does wash out in direct sunlight, so must be shaded to be readable. The Vista comes with a base map that has most major roads, towns and geographic features, but isn't detailed enough to be of much use. I recommend getting one of the Mapsource software packages to make the mapping feature more useful (Mapsource Topo for hikers, hunters and geocachers and Mapsource Metroguide for travelers).

I've found the magnetic compass and barometric altimeter in the Vista to be nice to have, but not necessities, as I always carry a hand held compass with me (never rely on solely on electronics in the woods) and the altimeter isn't a crucial feature in the relatively flat area I live in (northern NJ).

I wish the Vista had expandable memory, but I've yet to fill up the available memory (24 megs) despite having loaded topo maps for all of New Jersey, eastern PA, NYC, Long Island, upstate NY to Albany and most of southern Vermont, so it has yet to be an issue for me. For someone who travels extensively and doesn't have a laptop to load new maps, it can be.

Despite some criticism of the eTrex line's reception, I've experienced very good reception, even under heavy tree cover (and sometimes even in my pocket). The key here is to hold the unit horizontally. If you hold it upside down, or hang it around your neck you will lose reception. This can be a problem (who wants to have to hold the unit in their hand for all of a 6 mile hike?), but I addressed this by purchasing the case from Garmin ($14) and clipping it to the top of my pack's shoulder strap.

My major gripe with the unit is that the rubber gasket that surrounds the unit comes lose after about a year (it seems to be a problem with all eTrex's). It happened with both my Legend and Vista. In each case I sent them back to Garmin for warranty repair, but I'm sure I'll be doing it again in a year and the unit will be out of warranty by then (though Garmin's reputation is that they're pretty liberal with their warranty and will often repair out of warranty units free of charge).

Though its not a major negative, the Vista is designed to be operated using the left hand. I guess the designers felt that this would free up the right hand for other things, but most users (including me) seem to use the unit in their right hands which means that the thumb covers the screen when operating the click stick.

With the V3.10 of the software (or higher) the Vista now holds a whopping 1,000 waypoints. This is useful for geocachers, or anybody else who has a need for a lot of waypoints and its double what most other GPS units hold.