alfu47's Full Review: Garmin eTrex Legend Handheld GPS Receiver
... not for the build.
The case is shoddy, not what you would expect from this class of instrument. I have had my unit for quite a while now and the black rubber around the edge is glued on; said glue oozes out from underneath the band and gets your hand gooey. The adhesive tape under the band punctures at the buttons, allowing moisture in. The clear plastic display bezel scratches easily (don't ever wrap the lanyard around the case!), and the 4way nav stick cover wears off. The battery contact springs can short out a battery, conducting too much power thru the springs, and they loose their temper, resulting in poor contact. The serial port connector is proprietary and pricey.
The software could use some help, too. It freezes occasionally, and the only recourse is to remove the batteries; not great for anything mission-critical. Many of the menu selections could toggle or wrap around, but they don't. There is a fairly small and arbitrary limit on the number of waypoints you can accumulate, so you have to dump them to a computer file and start over if you want to save them.
If you have the time to take a lot of waypoints and have a spreadsheet capable of weightedly averaging the data, you can almost use this unit for surveying.
With the eTrex Legend, GARMIN has loaded a full basemap of North and South America into one small unit. The Legend is also designed to provide precise...More at eBay
Smallest handheld with mapping detail, WAAS enabled; accurate to less than 3 meters 8 MB internal memory for downloading maps (compatible with Garmin...More at Amazon Marketplace
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