Not sure which is best for my setup

WillJitsu · Occasional Visitor Joined: Oct 21, 2003 Posts: 2

I owned a Garmin Etrex Legend GPS receiver and recently my friend lost it. He has offered to buy me another one. I use it to connect to my laptop when I go on trips in the car. I use Microsoft Streets & Trips with it. I was curious if anything newer and better had come out in the past year since I bought the Garmin. I looked on their website and didn't see anything particularly great. Is there a better receiver to get for what I do? I read a few posts about the Bluetooth GPS units and apparently people are having a lot of problems with them. Is there a good one out there? Will it work with Streets & Trips? Do I have to buy a special connector for the laptop? I would greatly appreciate it if someone could answer these questions for me. Thanks Smile

lbendlin · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2003 12:45 am Post subject:

It all depends if you have been happy with your cable connection or if you want to go wireless. Probably not much of a problem when you use a laptop for navigation - you got already plenty of wires to take care of :D

Anyhow, there are some good BlueTooth receivers out there, their quality and durability is improving, and they all work with any application that accepts NMEA standard streams.

If your laptop is not yet BlueTooth enabled then you need either a USB BT dongle or a CF/PC card . Those can be had quite cheaply nowadays.

Hope this helps.
_________________
Lutz

Report Map Errors here:
TomTom/TeleAtlas NAVTEQ

WillJitsu · Occasional Visitor Joined: Oct 21, 2003 Posts: 2

Thanks for the reply! My laptop does not currently support bluetooth. It would be nice to try this kind of setup out. Where can I look at the USB dongles that are available? Also, what is a good brand receiver to get? Does Garmin make a bluetooth one? I want one that supports most of the features that the Etrex Legend has. I don't know much about any other brand besides Garmin though. Thanks again.

Pc-Mobile

Dave · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2003 6:51 am Post subject:

WillJitsu, the Legend is a good receiver, but it really depends on what you want to get out of the GPS Receiver. If you might want to load MapSource CD's onto it, and still like the eTrex range, then personally I would go for the Vista as it gives more memory support for this. If you would prefer a bigger screen, then a GPSMap76 or GPSMap76S. There's always Magellan, the Meridian range is good and offers SD card storage support for maps which gets over the Garmin limitation of a maximum 24mb memory for maps.

If you're happy with the Legend, I would stick with it. If the Legend worked with your laptop, then all other GPS Receivers will.

	PocketGPS
	Web