( 41 reviews )
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Posted: Aug 3 2009
I think its to early for a good review on my part. I am a fire fighter with a volunteer organization that uses the Etrex Legend. So I am familiar with that and the Vista HCx in which my paid department has. I learned that with the sensativity on these units from a vehicle they need to be close to the dash window. Knowing that helped me decide on going with the 60Cx with its higher sensitivity. I have to state that its much better as it will pick up sats in the middle of my truck, from inside the house and within our large steel roofed apparatus stalls. I did eventually lose the signal when I went into our sleeping area, which is block walls and concrete second level with metal roof above. Of course your not going to use it there but I wanted to see just how good it was. Pretty impressed with the other area's as stated above. Having the altimeter and area calculations is most helpful with wildland fire fighting as far as orienting and figuring size and location of a fire. Haven't used the 60Cx yet, but I'm sure it will happen soon. I also like the fact that you can use rechargable batteries in the unit. Maybe at a later date after I use the 60Cx hunting this fall I can give more info on the unit. I really can't give it a 5 rating yet, but expect that I probably can in the not so distant future. Hope this helps you making a decision. The price going thur amazon beat two other large outdoor/hunting retail stores. It pays to shop around! Thanks Amazon
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Posted: Jul 30 2009
I'm a member of our county's Search and Rescue team, and I teach land navigation (compass and map skills) and the use of GPS receivers to our members. For my needs, this unit is the best available. 1. No GPS is worth its weight unless it can track enough satellites (at least 4) to give you a 3D position fix. (A 2D fix on any GPS is unreliable -- be forewarned -- a GPS must calculate its elevation before it can reliably place you on a topo map, electronic or paper). The 60Cx has an extremely sensitive antenna and I can lock up 4+ satellites from within my home and under dense foliage while in a deep and narrow valley. To me, this is the single most important metric by which a GPS unit is judged. (As a bonus, it locks up quickly.) Give me reliable numbers (UTM or Lat/Long) and I'll find myself on a paper map (which I carry at all times when I'm in the wilderness). (I also like the fact that you can increase the sensitivity of this unit even more with an optional car antenna -- which could be used without the car, of course.) 2. It uses two AA batteries, which I far prefer to AAA batteries or some costly, exotic battery pack that will degrade over time. The AA batteries have a long life in this unit, and when they run out you slap in replacements and continue on. (My old Magellan eXplorest 500 used 3 AAAs, which were too short-lived.) 3. It's water-resistant and meets the IPX7 standard. What this means is that it will work after being submerged in 1 meter of water for 30 minutes. In other words, it's rain-proof. This is another essential feature for me. 4. You can purchase and install (Mac friendly) 1:24,000 Topo maps on an optional 4 GB Micro HC card (or buy the card with the map already installed). Expensive, yes, but the maps are very good. I installed all of Oregon, most of California and some of Nevada on my card. I thought such maps would be pure fluff until we did a mock search a few weeks ago and were given directions to our starting point that made no sense. We didn't know for sure where to start, though we had a rough idea of what our area (a trail hand-drawn on a xeroxed copy of a paper map) should look like relative to a stretch of road. By tracking our movement and projecting that track onto the GPS's topo map, we were able to confirm that we'd searched the correct trail, and we further discovered what the nature of the errors made by our map-makers were. Mistakes of this sort won't happen in the future, which was the whole point of the exercise. (The down side of getting the CD version of these maps and loading the Micro SD HC cards yourself is that it takes hours to do -- I believe it took me 6 hours or more. But it was worth it.) 5. The tracking feature is easy to use and very useful (see 4. above for one use). You can download your track to National Geographic's TOPO! map series (for Mac and Windows users) and MapTech (for Windows people). For SAR people, this is very useful since it can verify that we've searched the correct area. (You can download your track to the Incident Command's computer, which allows them to verify that you accomplished your mission while providing an electronic record of your search.) 6. You can customize your pages, which I like. While we use UTM for pounding ground, air and water assets use Lat/Long. If you can display both systems on the same page, it makes communicating with them a lot more secure than trying to enter your set-up menu and making the format change from UTM to Lat/Long on that page and then returning to your position page to read the coordinates, which is too much error-inviting screwing around when you're under pressure. I display both UTM and Lat/Long on my map page as a default. 7. Why not spring for the additional $40 -- $60 dollars and get the 60CSx, which has a barometric altimeter (rather than a less-accurate satellite-generated one) and an electronic compass? For us, the ?? 70 foot accuracy of the barometric altimeter still isn't good enough (that's almost two 40 foot contour lines), and the electronic compass might be a success from an engineering point of view, but SAR people need the kind of accuracy only a good traditional magnetic compass provides (I use a Type 15, and strongly recommend one, irrespective of manufacturer, to anyone venturing into the wilderness). (Your compass and paper map: don't venture into the backcountry without them . . .) 8. The unit comes with a little plastic belt clip that fastens to a disc-like projection on the back of the GPS unit. You slide the disc into the clip and feel it "click" as it locks in. The GPS will pivot around the disc easily, so it will accommodate you sitting down or moving in strange ways better than a case will. To remove the unit, simply press a button at the top of the clip to unlock it. This arrangement has been thought out very well. Like I said -- this unit is a jewell.
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( 0 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jul 18 2009
I work for the Border Patrol and use this on a daily basis. Its rugged enough for the rough terrain I push through in the southern desert and starts up very fast. All the features are great and I'm sure there are tons of cool things you can do with it that I havn't even played with yet.
