461
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #41,680 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★★★☆
Very good GPS receiver. Could be better (for a price).
You can see other positive reviews of the etrex Legend here, so I won't rehash them. The short story is that the Legend is a pretty decent GPS unit that works pretty well.
The base map included in the Legend only shows major highways and major streets. This is similar to the maps you get from a car rental agency. It's perfectly fine for doing rough navigation from city to city. At first, I tried using Rand McNally's StreetFinder and TripMaker Deluxe on my laptop with the Legend. The setup worked, but having to deal with the serial cable and using a laptop in the car was not very practical.
After I've had my Legend a while, I had a chance to borrow and use a Vista. The owner of the Vista upgraded it with detailed street-detail maps from Garmin's MapSource "Metroguide USA" CD .... The detailed street map is a really nice feature -- especially because you can look up addresses. Having such a detailed map in a small portable device is a delight! I decided to get the Metroguide for myself.
From my usage comparison, I found two things missing in the Legend compared to the top-end etrex Vista.
First, the Legend has only 8 MB of expansion memory instead of the 24 MB in the Vista. This turns out to be a big issue for me, as I would like to have a complete metro guide of the greater Los Angeles area. With 8 MB, I could only fit 6 of the 18 MetroGuide map sets that I would have liked. This means, I am missing coverage of a large section stretching roughly from Compton to Long Beach to Lynwood to Cerritos to Irvine that I would have wanted. In contrast, the Vista held all of greater Los Angeles area, plus some San Francisco, San Diego, and Las Vegas.
Second, the Vista has sensors for barometric altitude and magnetic compass heading. The Legend estimates altitude via GPS, and calculated heading based on your travel speed vector. If you are a trail-hiker, these sensors improve your navigation.
Used as-is from the factory (i.e., only the American basemaps), the Legend is perfectly fine, and I was quite happy with it.
I could live without the Vista's sensors;
But, having hit the 8 MB memory limit (trying to load Los Angeles), I would definitely go with the Vista now.
The Metroguide maps sizes of other cities may or may not be an issue for you. Go to the Garmin website and use their MapSourec Map Viewer and count the number of "yellow squares" you'll need to cover you area of interest. Each square roughly represents between 500K to 1.5 MB of data (with the smaller, "dense" squares being toward the 1 MB to 1.5MB size). You'll find that most of the big cities will have enough squares to easily exceed the 8 MB of the Legend.
