I went looking at the ones at walmart the other day....
I told the guy what I was looking for...one to map a lot of trails...he said the ones they had werent that good for that. said that they didnt have any highways or anything marked but the interstates and one like i was looking for would be 700+ bucks.

i dont know much of anything about GPS...but is there none out there in the 150-250 buck range that will do this and show roads and highways? and one that i can map to something like google earth or something?

I have a Garmin etrex Legend the blue one and you can get them well under 200.00 now. It has a built in base map. It actually saved me this weekend on my way home fron Hyden. I had a blowout on my trailer, looked up the closest wal-mart and it was only 7 miles away. I use this thing very much.......

Geterdun

BCO, I don't know what the guy at wally world was talking about, but you can get the Garmin Etrex Legend from wal-mart.com on sale for a little over $200 I've seen the Etrex Vista was around $250 on the web. The vista has a few more features like a stand still compass, barometric altimiter, etc. Do a google search for 'garmin etrex vista cx'. Heres just one link http://www.jjielectronics.com/index.asp ... WAodXgGGbA

BCO, Just about every company that makes a gps has one that will make maps for under 300. Even my "old" magellan does. I found additional "free" software on the internet to make maps with.

I'd like to know where that guy at Wal-Mart was getting his information from. I guess he may have just been one of them types that likes to think they know a lot about everything, and make stuff up to make it seem like they do.

You can get a Garmin 60CSx for the mid $300 range now. That is one that is considered to be top of the line by many people. Well below the $700 the wal-mart guy made up.

Even if he was thinking about the auto navigation ones, which he had to be to come up with that high a price, a basic one of those only costs about $400, probably less now.

Basically all you need is a GPS that has the ability to record a track, and download to your computer to keep a log of the trails you ride. Well, that and software on the computer to download it too. You can also buy maps to upload to your GPS, they have topo maps, and detailed street maps, most of which you can use to create a route and upload to your handheld GPS and get turn by turn directions with.

Archer, You might mention that the maps that you buy need to be Garmin maps. A friend of mine bought National Geographic Topo but could not download them to his Garmin unit. However he might be able to download tracks from his gps to NG. Not sure. I am pretty sure the only maps you can download to any Garmin unit needs to be Garmin software. I have the Garmin Gpsmap 60csx and the Garmin Etrex legend cx, with the City Navigator, U.S Recreational Lakes with fishing hot spots, US topo 24K national Parks, and United States topo east. All Garmin software. If you are a Garmin fan like me, check out their site to make sure the software they offer as well is compatible with the unit you want. If one wants to do mapping I would recomend one with expaneble memory. I.E. Micro SD card instead of internal memory. C=Color, S=Barometric Altimeter and Still Compass, X=micro SD Card which you can put in a larger capcity than the one that comes from the factory. Hence more maps. Tracks etc can be put on the larger Micro SD cards. I have the 1gb in both of my units. They both perform like they are supposed to and do a very good job. The 60csx does better a better job with picking up signal as it is advertised in dense foilage and deep canyon. I might add when you buy a garmin gps, it will come with Trip and waypoint Manager software to put on you computer. It has basic roads. More like magor roads. This is the base software to allow you to comunicate back and forth to your PC. To really get the good use out of your unit you might want above metioned software, depenending on your needs. Hope this sheds some light on this subject.

That's a good point 05grizzly. If someone does want to download maps to their GPS they have to use that companies specific software, whether it be Garmin, Magellan, or some other company.

My recommendation for that would be to get the pre-loaded SD cards when it's possible. Then all you would have to do is plug it in and you'd have the maps. That's the only reason to want to have the software pretty much, is to be able to load the maps. It's pretty useless on the computer, a little too basic for any real use.

There are better, free programs out there to do other things with. EasyGPS is a great waypoint management program. There are many programs that let you create turn by turn routes that can then be uploaded to GPS. Then there are programs like the National Geographic one, that are really good to download tracks and waypoints back and forth to and from the GPS on, and they allow you to do more editing, and have better base maps, when you want to pay a little for something.

When I get the Delorme Topo program in, I'll do a good review of that one, and let everyone know what I think of it. I've already mentioned a couple other programs in another thread.