Garmin Garmin Oregon 450 Handheld GPS Navigator

Comments about Garmin Oregon 450 World Wife:

Great dual-purpose GPS. Can navigate to co-ordinates as well as do turn-by-turn navigation (no speech-to-text, however). Many free maps available from the Internet that work well with the GPS, both routable and topographic. Can pickup satellites inside although it takes several minutes compared to less than one minute outdoors-should work well in areas with limited l.o.s. to satellites.

Comments about Garmin Oregon 450 World Wife:

I use it hiking in Hawaii and after some initial confusion on how to use it (this is my first GPS) it makes sense now. It is pretty useless with the pre-installed maps and you need to purchase or find free topo maps for the area in which you will be using it. You need to find an install MapSource to install most free maps from places like gpsfiledepot, but MapSource is hard to find without paying for a map set from Garmin. Luckily, installing their Training Center software comes with a version of Mapquest which can be upgraded to the latest which can be downloaded from Garmin for free.

Mapquest doesn't do much more than help with installing maps as it is not compatible with most features of this GPS (like creating and transferring waypoints), so I needed to download and install BaseCamp (free from Garmin). BaseCamp makes creating and managing waypoints easy.

I love the touch screen and although it does swipe as smoothly as a device like and iPod Touch, makes menu navigation easier.

It takes a while to connect to satellites and does not work indoors, but once connected it is very responsive and accurate. It does chew through alkaline batteries, though so rechargeables are a must.

So far, I am very happy with my purchase.

Comments about Garmin Oregon 450 World Wife:

The etrex series has better functions on each screen, but does not download to Garmin connect or have heart rate and bicycle cadence capability. Just can't have it all.

Comments about Garmin Oregon 450 World Wife:

I use the product for hiking and hunting in the pacific NW and Montana. Hiking/hunting in dense trees where you can't see landmarks makes ocular navigation difficult. This is a good product, however, I am not impressed with the maps that come with it.

Comments about Garmin Oregon 450 World Wife:

I go on quite a few back roads and jeep trails in Colorado. This Garmin has become really useful and effective once I downloaded topo maps of the mountains. Need new excuses now for the wife since I can't get lost