Happy with my new Vista HCx

[Mike Hillis]

Pretty cool little tool.

Keeps a lock even indoors most places and when it does loose it when I get totally enclosed by concrete (cell phones and pagers go dead here too) it picks right back up in no time.

Easy to navigate through the pages and menus and one hand operation is a breeze.

2 gigs holds a ton of maps.

One tip.....When loading your topo maps....rename them by area or state in Map Source before you load them, otherwise you spend a lot of time scrolling through the maps in the GPS looking for that individual map to activiate.

HH

Mike

 

[Andrew Kalinowski]

The "H" series receivers are indeed very sensitive. In fact, I think that for the "H" they should change name of eTrex to something else - the old eTrex were dogs under canopy. "H" are very good. It's the same receiver as in the 60 Cs(x) and few other newer offerings from Garmin.

Regarding selecting maps; when you have lot of them loaded on a card, turning them ON and OFF one by one is a pain no matter how you name them. The best method to me is to turn them on by the entire group. It's not obvious how to do that - the manual doesn't cover it very well if at all but, it's pretty much the same for all Garmins. Once you are on the map screen and select "Map Setup" you select "i" (info) and that's where the individual maps can be turned On and Off. Don't do that/ Instead, with "info" displayed, use the pull down menu again and you will see an option to turn Off / On entire group of maps. So, for example, you can turn off all of the Metro Guide and turn On all of the Topo. Much easier than going through an endless list of individual map sections.

 

[Mike Hillis]

n/t

 

[hsjrev]

[quote Andrew Kalinowski]The "H" series receivers are indeed very sensitive. In fact, I think that for the "H" they should change name of eTrex to something else - the old eTrex were dogs under canopy. "H" are very good. It's the same receiver as in the 60 Cs(x) and few other newer offerings from Garmin.

[/quote]

The new H series receivers are very good but it's not the same receiver chipset as the 60CSx. The H models use the brand new Mediatek chip and the 60CSx and others use the SiRF III chip. Both seem to work equally well but they're from two different manufacturers.

 

[Andrew Kalinowski]

Thanks for the correction. Somehow I missed that Garmin went with Mediatek chip sets for their newest high sensitivity receivers and since in my Rino 530 HCx does as well (or maybe even better?) as 60 Cs, I thought that they use the same SiRF chip sets. In any case; they are head and shoulder above what Garmin reception used to be.