GPS

Garmin eTrex Venture is a good entry level choice for genreal purpose. It is not too pricy and is very easy to use. Good reception outdoor. The battery life is sufficient and it came with many good features such as recording tracks and sunrise sunset time as well as area calculation. It is also very accurate in terms of plotting your location and calculating your heading and speed. The only down side is poor reception when inside the car. You have to point it close to the window and possibly have to row it down if you have dark sunscreen. Or you have to sit in front seat and place the unit right under the windshield. The memory is also quite limited with 1MB. However, if your main purpose is not for driving navigation, I highly recommand this unit because its easy to use and fair price.

This is the 2nd GPS I've purchased, the first being one for someone else back in early 2001. Since taking up geocaching in March of 2003 and purchasing the Venture soon after that, I've had the opportunity to take a look at the old model (which was also a Garmin and looks like it belongs in a museum already), as well as a couple of Magellans and one of the Garmin Gekkos. So far, I like this unit more than any of the others I've seen.

The three things that really stand out in this product are the screen resolution (much clearer than any of the other units), the icon choices (I couldn't believe my friend's Magellan doesn't have a geocache as an option! Let alone a found geocache), and the durability (the other units all had hard plastic bodies that wouldn't bounce or take a fall as well as the rubber-coated Venture).

I only give this a four because I'm sure there is better out there, though perhaps not at this price range. My friend's Magellan, which is priced much higher than the Venture, does have some actual road maps in the device, as opposed to the Venture's city points, but for my purposes, this unit is doing all that I require of it and more. Given the limited research I did, I am thus far not at all disappointed that I paid up from the Gekko models or that I didn't pay up to the even higher priced models.

much too advance for a begenner!