Garmin eTrex Vista C vs CX

ryans590 · Occasional Visitor Joined: Mar 09, 2006 Posts: 3

hello im a new member here and i have a cupple questions. #1 im looking at a Garmin eTrex Vista C or a Garmin eTrex Vista CX what do you pepole think of this unit any imput is welcome. Queation #2 im looking for some good maping software for my laptop. I live in northern British Columbia, Canada and i want something that has all the lakes back rodes ect. I do a lot of back country camping/hikeing and mountan biking and i havent been able to find anything that is very detailed. thanks in advance

BernieK

...I've owned a Vista C for several years, lovely piece of kit but I only bought it because I already had Garmin Streetpilot that comes complete with Garmin City Navigator software. This very expensive software provides the hi-res, street-level autorouting data for the SP. The software is locked to the electronic internal serial number of the GPS unit.

Fortunately, Garmin allows the software to be unlocked to two of their GPS units. Thus, I can unlock the CN software for the Vista C too and get full autorouting on it as well as the SP in the car. To buy as a standalone product, CN is expensive and difficult to obtain as it is only provided with hardware. Citizens of N America can buy CN Europe and we in Europe can buy CN USA. Gamin's policy.

CN is in the process of being updated to Version 8. You will need to have the extended memory of the Vista Cx (with microSD slot) to be able to fully exploit CN because of the size of the map tiles. These are the minimum lumps of map data that can be selected for download to the GPS unit. The limited memory of the Vista C (24 MB) will restrict the number of map tiles you can install.

Summary - if you already own City Navigator software, Vista Cx is a good choice. If you don't, the hardware is only half the solution, the software you need to fully exploit the hardware will double the cost.

	PocketGPS
	Web