I've used a GPS for the last few years when hiking and travelling, and recently the call of the newer high-sensitivity receivers and ability to load gigabytes of mapping onto the units finally wore me down. I plonked my trusty non-mapping Garmin GPS60 on ebay and picked up what I could for it, about $180. (they still sell new ex US for $250 odd). The new one I selected came from the US and cost just under $300 including freight, so my changeover, including a 2Gb memory card comes to about $150, so the old unit basically cost me about $50 a year. This unit sells for around $500 locally.
The new unit (Garmin Etrex Vista HCx) is a little ripper. For starters, it has a colour screen. It will pick up satellites indoors and undercover where the old unit would dropout almost as soon as you walked in the door. It's faster to pickup the initial location from turn-on as well, probably as a result of the more sensitive receiver. This model has an inbuilt compass and barometer - the compass is not so useful except when stopped and I have turned it off to conserve battery life, but the barometer means that the unit will give you an accurate elevation profile of your journey, something the old unit could not. (in fact, anytime I used the GPS-based altimeter on the old unit, I found it had significant error)
Unit is about the same size as a desktop mouse.
Mapping is a revelation. If you are familiar with the whole GPS map thing, you'd know that the maps tend to be the software that you pay through the nose for, and a few sets of maps will easily be much more investment than the GPS they run on. For instance the Garmin City Navigator maps for Australia run to about $250 on discount. Maps for GPS are like Lenses for DSLR's.
While I was researching this whole thing, I came across Shonkymaps. Shonkymaps is a labour of love by a single individual to provide Garmin-compatible maps from freely available Australian mapping data. It's free, and based o the 250k scale set from Geoscience Australia, and is licensed for non-commercial use. These maps have as much or more detail as commercial products, including street names and contours. What they don't provide is the data for routing (ie. directions from getting between place A and B) For that convenience, you need to pay for a commercial product or spend the time building your own routes. Auto-routing on the Garmin maps is said to work well, but be aware that there are no voice instructions available with this or similar handhelds, so it's not a replacement for an in-car instructional GPS.
Battery life with the compass off is about the same as my old unit by all accounts (about 24 hours) The unit itself is smaller than the old unit, and weighs considerably less. Like most handheld GPS, it's waterproof and shockproof within reasonable limits.
I'll add updates to this, once I've had a chance to test it in the field (excuse the pun)
Michael
