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Garmin Etrex Venture HC GPS Receiver

User Review: 5 out of 5 stars - Good!
My boyfriend and I took on the hobby of geocaching. We bought this Garmin because of the geocaching site suggested it. (We bought a cheaper one from a department store and returned it the next day.) It's easy to use and we've had a lot of fun with it!



User Review: 5 out of 5 stars - Very good product
It's a very good product, I would buy it again.
The only thing that I don't like is that it takes a lot of time to acquire the satellites. But it's ok anyways.



User Review: 5 out of 5 stars - Great Sat Grabber
I upgraded to this from my old Etrex for better satellite lock, and I got it. I can sit in my cabin and pull 8 sats through the roof! No more looking for breaks in the trees so I can get my bearings. It's got a lot more goodies than my last Etrex, but I haven't even gotten around to using them yet. All I wanted is something that would acquire quickly and keep giving me data, no matter what was overhead. The Venture HC delivered it.



User Review: 3 out of 5 stars - So-So Starter Unit
Got this unit to start geocaching with my kids.

PROS are: It seems to be very accurate, screen is easily readable, color is good, seems well made and durable. The unit is also able to obtain a satellite when indoors near a window which was very surprising.
CONS are: no built in compass which makes it very difficult to get to the geocache when you get very close. If you stand still it will confuse you and point to a different direction. The unit only points toward the destination when you are moving. So when you get close to the cache you need to constantly walk back and forth to figure out where it is. If you stop walking the display will point toward screen-north and not the destination.

Also, the Garmin operating system was a little less than intuitive causing me to read the manual more than I would usually need to for other small electronics. After much searching the manual still does not tell you how to manually enter a waypoint if you have the coordinates. It makes mention of the possibility then fails to explain how. (By the way, you use the "Mark" feature and then edit the info to do this).

Despite the fairly major limitation of not having a compass we have still had success in finding our destinations. However if I had known about what trouble lack of a compass would bring I would not have bought it. My kids (9 and 6) are not able to find a geocache without the compass and get frustrated walking in circles when near the destination.

I can see a unit with a compass in our future.



User Review: 5 out of 5 stars - Ideal for geocaching
We bought this for our family's new hobby: geocaching. Works great! Easy one-hand operation makes it very convenient, and the readout is very clear and intuitive, so that even my children can use it. Looking around the menus on this thing, we are probably only using 10% of what it can do. We are not doing any intense hikes, so I'm not sure how the more advanced features might compare with other GPS's out there, but we're very pleased.


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