GPS Outlet & Clearance Review • Best Price

My first day impression. I’m pretty certain you already know all of the written specs on this GPSr.

Good:

Very quickly locks satellite signals, even inside my house. The SIRF receiver technology is great. The display can easily be read in the day. Uses the same power cables as some of the older Garmins. Magnetic compass turns on automatically when you walk at a normal pace which keeps the arrow pointing at your waypoint (cache), assuming your magnetic north is close to true north. The GPSr includes a thumbnail microSD memory chip for adding digital maps. It is located inside the battery compartment. Battery door has a rubber seal to keep out water. Color display is very nice. Using the arrow mode with the magnetic compass in this high sensitivity receiver makes geocaching much easier. The GPSr should work well in urban jungles.

Needs work:

Can’t read the display at night without turning on the display light. Oh well. That’s what battery chargers are for. The included Americas base map is a very bad joke. Doesn’t show a single city main street. Only major highways. My ancient, plain vanilla, Garmin GPSIII+ has a significantly better base map. Because of this you will probably be FORCED to buy the Garmin City Navigator DVD. Then comes the fun of installing the included Waypoint Manager CD and drivers. It took me two tries to get the drivers to install and talk to the microSD chip. When all this is finished you’ll quickly discover that the 64mb chip only has enough room to hold one or maybe two City Navigator state maps. At that point you’ll probably want to buy a 512mb microSD chip.

I hoped to add a street map for an upcoming vacation in London but I’m now in major map price sticker shock because of the price Garmin is asking. It seems that Garmin has developed a perfect business model. Include a truly bad base map in your receiver and then pick your pocket for usable maps.

I live in a Chicago suburb and travel on my insurance and financial planning appointments that somehow people constantly give the wrong directions, and Mapquest cant find!

I wanted a GPS that I could use for camping up in the UP of Michigan, go out on the ATV, and use in the car. Finally Garmin came out with this product that can do both well and I bought it.

Why? Because most hand helds have limited memory, which I did not want for traveling because you have to have a computer with you to keep downloading detailed street maps. The unit only comes with a general highway map. The other choice was to buy 2 units, one for the car and one for the outdoors. Not what I wanted to do!

This unit has expandable memory sticks with up to 256mb each that can hold detailed maps of several states. In addition, you can add the TOPO map for hiking and offroading. Just put it on a seperte memory stick if you don’t want to delete the street maps on your other memory sticks. When you update the maps the old info is wiped off of the memory stick.

I have been using the unit for about 2 weeks now in the car, and it is awesome. Very accurate, and very, very fast, too.

It can find satellites and work in my basement! It calculates routes in a matter of 3-5 seconds or so for a 350 mile trip. It recalculates a route when you miss a turn in about 2 seconds.

Amazing!

This is my fourth handheld GPS (I have 6 total). My handhelds are an old first-run eTrex, an eTrex Vista, and a Magellan Meridian Platinum. The 60CSx is definately the best. The most important aspect of any GPS unit is the ability to pick up the satellites. The 60CSx does this without fail while hanging from a belt loop, while in deep woods, at the bottom of 500 foot ravines in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. My other units have to be held up overhead at full arms length and get only spotty reception at best. The Magellan is definately the best of the others but I do not like the size of it or the button locations or the software nearly as much as the Garmin 60. I can palm a basketball, yet the Magellin is too large for my hand to comfortably operate the buttons. The stability and reproducability of the 60CSx is excellent. Consider my return trip to the trailhead on a recent hike. At one point the 60CSx said I was about 150 feet off the earlier track. This seemed too much. I bushwacked over about 150 feet to find the trail and then realized that a cross country ski path intersected with the trail and I had not noticed it on the way in. In my humble opinion this is excellent performance. I purchased the MapSource software which has all the trails I will ever need for about $100. My only complaint is that top quality, alkaline, batteries only last about 10 hours, and not the 30 hours listed in the ad copy. I carry another set of batteries for a day hike. I am very happy with this purchase.