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bogdan » i love the garmin etrex venture cx. firs …

07:22 pm on Jul 24, 2010 | read the article | tags: outside

i love the garmin etrex venture cx. first of all, i bought it with sightseeing in mind. i’ve used it for my euro-trip and it worked flawlessly. since recently i’m only part-time pedestrian and with my orientation abilities close to zero i’ve searched for a good gps solution. as an iphone user i’ve got myself the i go my way app. which is quite nice, but so slow that i’d rather use google maps instead of it. anyways, i’ve setup my etrex and was surprised by the accuracy and easiness it gets me to my destination. it doesn’t have the fancy voice feature (which i find very annoying) just some proximity beeps. but instead, it works very fast, it’s gps signal is excellent most of the time (rarely, near tall buildings it gets lost, but only for a few seconds), you have “tracks” that you can follow to get back from where you’ve started, it keeps a log of your trip, with nice features like average speed on segments as small as 1 meter and even elevation, and mostly, for me, it fits right in my air outtake from left of the steering wheel, without any adapters. and yes, it keeps the lighter plug open, as it uses two aa batteries, either alkaline or rechargeable nimh that will go for at least one day (24h) of heavy use. if you’re thinking of getting one, the venture cx is discontinued, but you can choose whatever etrex gadget with “cx” designation (i recommend vista hcx).