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The dream machine, by Anonymous on 22/08/2007

Overall Rating

I bought this to replace my Etrex Vista as my car's athermic windscreen blocks GPS signals and the GPSmap76CSx accepts an external aerial input.

This unit is veratile enough for the road, the hills and the sea. Its use of microSD cards allows detailed maps to be stored although I outgrew the supplied 128Mb card in 3 days and upgraded to a 1Gb one. If you buy the Mapsource UK Topo DVD, a 128Mb card will fill very quickly. The included Trip and Waypoint Manager is good and allows up and downloading of data but getting detailed Mapsource software is recommended.

The USB interface gives the to ability to transfer data to and from a PC quickly. To get the best out of this unit, the Mapsource programmes to give you street level detail, I already had UK and France both of which are in memory. The Topographical map is a godsend to walkers giving contours, paths and water courses, interestingly, none of the hills are named.

The GPS is a little larger than I expected but packed with features.

The routing facility is excellent giving turn-by-turn plotting and information about turns in good time with the choice of various tabular, compass and graphical displays including a 'highway' display that looks quite Tom Tom et al ish. Just enter the start and end points and press 'navigate' and it will calculate the route and give the option of simulating driving it. Setting recalculate to automatic means that missed turns and detours will result in a bit of swift rethinking and the new route will be calculated.

For walkers the pressure barometer/altimeter will be of use but the really useful component is the electronic magnetic compass that kicks in when stationary. The compass page also allows Sight 'n Go that lets a heading to be locked in to the unit and even projected a certain distance to become a waypoint. Of course, switching on track logging and you get detailed information about your chosen route. Upload that into Mapsource and you can also get the height profile.

On the water, the unit floats and can tolerate a period of submersion. Garmin produce Blue Chart marine charts that include port and tidal information. The unit will drive up to 3 NMEA devices via the serial interface. The unit can be set to show a course to make good and will give of course warnings should you drift off course by a user set amount.

I would thoroughly recommend this unit to anyone who uses a GPS, it is a little more complex than the standard car satnav units but this gives it immense flexibility and, with a little familiarisation time, makes it an infinitely more useful piece of kit.

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