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GPS Sat Nav Review of the Garmin etrex Legend

Just before our Dorset Holiday in 2005 we purchased a portable Global Positioning System (GPS) Satellite Navigation receiver (Sat Nav).  We figured that such a gadget was a useful accompaniment on our walks.  Here's our review...
Also on this page: Oct 2006 sat nav update | Aug 2007 sat nav update | Geocaching | GPS website links
Other product reviews | Panasonic camcorder | 2 way radios

This review assumes a basic understanding of the appropriate technology. Reviewed Sept 2005.

After some careful Internet research we choose the Garmin etrex Legend GPS personal navigator as being suitable for our needs, some further web research for an online supplier (GPS Warehouse) and our Sat Nav arrived the next day - at 7.30 AM!

Background in a nutshell
GPS uses a number of orbiting satellites, the signals from which are picked up by the GPS Sat Nav receiver which can then compute your position.  This Sat Nav unit is designed for portable navigation (eg. for walkers like us!) and resembles a mobile phone with a large screen.  It comes with a pre-loaded zoomable Basemap showing main roads, railways, towns and cities.  Locations can be added (waypoints), either for the current location or for a projected location, which can then be named and symbolised.  Routes can then be set between waypoints.  When moving, it draws a breadcrumb trail on the map and computes information such as current, average and max speed, distance travelled, stopped and moving time.  The TracBack feature allows you to retrace your path along this trail.  Using the GoTo function to navigate to a pre-determined location, such as a waypoint, the unit can display the time and distance remaining until arrival and the ETA.  A compass can be viewed to navigate, this also shows the number of degrees needed to turn to get back on track.  The User Interface (UI) works much like Windows does on a PC, with a number of pages and a clickable joystick that functions like a mouse.  Routes and trails can be named and stored in its built-in 8Mb memory.  Street level maps can be purchased and loaded from CD (via a computer).  There's more to all this, but that's the basics!

Above right. Mike holds the GPS Sat Nav receiver in his hand with the map page displaying our trail from our waypoint marked cottage (by the little pan arrow) and running south of Dorchester.

We try it in the car
We only had a day or so to learn about our GPS receiver and how to work it before our holiday, however it was all fairly straightforward.  We first tried the Sat Nav on the car journey from home to the holiday cottage and set the cottage location as a waypoint on the Basemap, by inputting the National Grid Reference (NGR) which in turn we obtained by inputting the Post Code into multimap.com.  Of course, we'd already marked our home location waypoint during our learning, so all we needed to do was create a route between the two and off we went!  Despite the warnings implying that it wouldn't pick up the satellite signals through the windscreen (our windscreen is UltraViolet filtered and has a QuickClear element, apparently both bad news at getting a signal) it worked perfectly lying on the dash.  Now Belinda's paper map navigational skills are second to none of course, so we referred to the Sat Nav as confirmation we were headed in the right direction and to view the miles remaining and our ETA.  We arrived at the cottage with the Sat Nav unit saying we had another quarter mile and some 20 seconds to go, this can no doubt be put down to the very rural location having a very wide Post Code area!

We try it on our walks
We used the Sat Nav unit on our Hardy's Monument walk to see if it could get us back to the cottage by using the TracBack feature.  This works by saving the breadcrumb trail we left on the outward journey and selecting 'TracBack' from the saved track menu.  The time and miles to destination are shown by default on the navigation page with a compass, we customised the display to additionally show the ETA and To Course on the display, the latter shows how many degrees to turn to maintain the correct direction.  It worked brilliantly, we purposely walked past a point where we should have turned right and the Sat Nav unit compass arrow swung round to show the correct direction in an instant.  The ETA was within 1 minute too, not bad when the trip computer has to work this out by constantly updating our speed computation, including stops for a swig of water and a pee (Mike)!

However, we found a problem using GPS on our walk along the South West Coast Path at Lyme Regis.  As the walk was mainly in dense woodland, the Sat Nav unit had trouble picking up the satellites signal.  It needs to receive at least three to work, the trees blocking its view of the sky and the resultant trail was very patchy.  We didn't try the TracBack, but we expect it would have had trouble following such a broken trail.

On our Fleet walk, also along the S. W. Coast Path, the trail was complete as the footpath was well out in the open.  That was good for the Sat Nav unit, but not for us in the hot hot sun!  This was a circle route and the GPS really came into its own when, having been forced along some twiddly bits, we came out to a little road and our sense of direction said to turn right.  The GPS showed the start of our trail (where we had parked the car) to be to the left, thus saving us from going completely in the wrong direction!

An issue that manifested itself on our walks was with having to hold the Sat Nav unit in your hand all the time in order to receive a signal.  This became a bit tiresome and sometimes awkward when needing both hands to cross a style, for instance.  We tried carrying it in a bumbag and at the top of Mike's (why do I always carry all the stuff) backpack, but in both cases the GPS signal was too poor, even in open country.

Some subsequent tests we did in Brighton showed us to be just north of the main A259 coast road when we were out at sea at the end of the quarter mile long pier!  This inaccuracy rather makes it superfluous of GPS being capable of an accuracy to, typically, 12 meters and certainly doesn't enthuse us to buy the MapSource CDs to give street level mapping.  Would it ever show us in the right street?  Come to that, would it receive enough satellite signal in town anyway??

Batteries
We've added this bit as we experienced problems in this area too.  The Sat Nav receiver takes two 'AA' sized batteries, either dry or rechargeable cells.  We used modern Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH), convenient for us as our digital camera and MP3 player use the same cells.  We found that fully charged batteries barely lasted the day out using the Sat Nav unit from, typically, 10am until 6pm.  There's a battery saver mode which did extend battery life, but the trade off was less frequent satellite signal checking, resulting in even more patchy trail drawing.  We  tried setting the backlight to the minimum too, to conserve power.  However, we needed to carry spare cells (fortunately a battery change doesn't loose data as it's stored on internal flash memory) to ensure continued operation all day.  Keeping enough batteries charged for a day's walking became a logistical challenge with only one charger able to charge a pair of NiMH's for 8 hours at any one time.  Some nights Mike (why me!) was changing batteries in the middle of the night to provide enough for the next day (yawn!).  Of course, the easy solution is to buy another charger, they're cheap enough after all, but surely if mobile phones can easily last in excess of one day on a charge then so should a little GPS Sat Nav unit.

Other features briefly
The Sat Nav receiver also has a calculator, area calculator (eg. walk round a field and calculate the acres), distance calculator, hunt and fish calculator, calendar with notes, sun/moon set/rise times (can be projected for different locations and days), a favourites store and a find feature, eg. find a town which it then describes.

Our overall conclusions
The Garmin etrex Legend GPS Sat Nav unit we used does have some very useful features for walkers, such as its ability to get you back to your starting point or to guide you to a pre-determined point.  It also provides reassurance that you're going in the right direction when otherwise you'd have no idea.
We do have some serious concerns regarding its ability to correctly show the position on the Basemap, plus its ability to receive a consistent satellite signal in wooded and built-up areas.  Not all walking is done along open paths!
We suspect the same situation here as experienced with cell phone technology in the late 1980s.  The system was initially designed for vehicle use, using an external aerial.  Cell coverage would drop out with early handheld portable phones.  The situation will surely improve with satellite strength and coverage, making handheld GPS a better proposition in say, a few years time.  There's also the new Galileo navigation system in development, see links below.  An early adopter of technology is often disappointed.
For now, by all means purchase a handheld GPS Sat Nav receiver, but beware of its limitations and be sure to take an old fashioned paper map with you too!

Left. The trip computer page showing trip and total miles, moving and stopped time and max and average speeds. The 'speed' field on the left only registers when moving.

Update - one year on.  Living with our GPS Sat Nav receiver
Since we wrote the above article a year has passed.  In that time we've used our GPS Sat Nav receiver on many trips and outings - weekend breaks in the Rye area in 2005 and Arundel area in 2006, our 2006 Somerset holiday, in London, and on many walks.

To start on a positive note, we've largely solved the short battery life problem with the purchase of some higher capacity NiMh cells.  We easily get a day's usage now using 2100 mAh capacity batteries, although we still can't understand why the Sat Nav receiver consumes so much power.

The GPS receiver has proved to be a robust little unit, as we've dropped it a least twice onto hard tarmac and all it suffered were some minor abrasions.  However, that brings us to the first bad point.  The reason we dropped it in the first place on one occasion was because the battery cover attachment clip came undone.  As this clip also doubles as the eyelet for the lanyard, the unit dropped to the ground - with battery cover still attached to our wrist via the lanyard!  The clip turns through 90 degrees to attach and it easily comes undone, a more robust clip or, better still, an attachment for the lanyard on the main unit would be a better design.

We've been unable to solve the poor integration with the Basemap, despite tinkering with the magnetic variation setting and Map Datum.  We've also looked for a software upgrade that may solve this problem, but there hasn't been one from Garmin since we brought the Sat Nav receiver over a year ago.

The problem with poor GPS satellite reception in the city or wooded areas remains too.  On a visit to London we couldn't get a GPS signal in the West End at all, until we moved into Hyde Park then it was fine.  The same problem with no signal was apparent at Cheddar Gorge when climbing Jacobs Ladder.  And on another occasion we thought the unit had failed as it couldn't latch onto any signal at all for several hours, this under heavy cloud cover, but hey, clouds are not that unusual!

On a number of occasions the GPS Sat Nav receiver reported silly data on the Trip Computer page - recording 106 miles and an average speed of 56 mph on a short walk (and we thought it was the hill that puffed us!).  Another time was even more ridiculous when it said we'd done 619 miles, hit 622 mph and a moving average of 317 mph!  Now Mike's car's fast, but not that fast!  Crazy!

Right. Wow, just see here how fit we are!  The Trip Computer says we've walked 264 miles in 1hr 21mins at an average of 194mph while all along our top speed was 9.1mph (that in itself is an impossibility walking!).

Now to finish our update on a more positive note.  During our weekend break in Arundel early in 2006 we noticed it reporting a higher accuracy - to within 4 meters sometimes.  So maybe the promised GPS correction system satellites in Europe (EGNOS) are now coming into use?

Our main use for the Sat Nav is to assist with finding a different way back to where we started a walk and using the GoTo function to navigate to a pre-determined (projected) waypoint, giving us the miles countdown and destination ETA.  For these uses the Sat Nav unit is fine, if a bit limited by the number of routes and tracks it can store and subject to it receiving a solid satellite signal.

Two years on update - and a spooky sat nav story!
Well, after two years we've used our Garmin etrex Legend GPS Sat Nav receiver a fair bit and become familiar with all its little quirks and annoyances.  Following on from last year's update, we had another crazy reading instance on a walk - some 300 miles at 100 mph in an afternoon!  But even with a turbo powered vindaloo curry Mike can't walk that fast, or far!!

The problem with the Sat Nav receiver being unable to get a GPS satellite signal under heavy cloud, tree or city buildings remain, frustratingly this is the time you probably need it the most!  We're sick of seeing the message 'poor signal, need clear view of the sky' - godammit, it's got a clear view of the sky!  Another thing to report is that the left top most button - used to zoom out on the map - seems to require more pressing than the others and we think it's become more recessed too.  This is worrying as it doesn't get excessive use.  If this indicates a looming mechanical failure with our Sat Nav unit, that would certainly be unacceptable in such a short time.

We discovered an issue with the navigate a route feature.  One day we attempted to use the GoTo to navigate to a projected waypoint we'd set, but appeared to have no GPS satellite signal for the whole journey (horror, we had to use... a map!...).  We thought the Sat Nav receiver had failed, but later realised it was still set to navigate a previous route.  So the unit just refused to acknowledge a signal when confronted with this conflict.  No error message, it just gave up.  A software upgrade would probably fix this, but none have been forthcoming for the etrex Legend from Garmin.

The Sat Nav receiver is said to withstand immersion in water.  We've never tested this, but we did have a problem with the display misting up when using the unit in warm sunshine a week after previously using it in drizzle.  So it had clearly gotten damp inside.  Although this quickly cleared up of its own accord, nevertheless we wouldn't want to test the water immersion capability!

Now, the spooky sat nav story...
One day we discovered a mystery waypoint we hadn't set.  It was numbered 13 too, ooh er!  So we decided to navigate to it, somewhere in Brighton.  We trotted off towards the Hove border and found it located in a side street off a main road, although we could only get to within 10 meters as the waypoint was in someone's property.  So we retired to the nearby cafe to ponder on this.  Now we've used this cafe before, and the obvious explanation is that we inadvertently marked the waypoint on the Sat Nav then.  But we've never been down the street nearest the point, and in any case the cafe is a good 150 meters away.  Now a GPS coordinate is rather fixed in position and cannot move, if we did set a waypoint in error previously then either the GPS satellites are inaccurate or our Sat Nav receiver is.  We tested this theory by navigating to the waypoint we set outside our home over two years ago when we first bought the unit, and this was still spot-on.  We tried it with another early waypoint, also exactly right.  So that's a relief, but it still doesn't explain our mystery waypoint...

The GPS Sat Nav locations may be accurate, but we're still plagued by the inaccurate Basemap.  The photos (or rather video stills) below illustrate just how hopeless this is, from a walk we did along The Shropshire Way on holiday recently.  Notice the road and railway line seem to be the wrong way round too, were going to hit the road first.

One final point on waypoint accuracy.  We often enter into the Sat Nav a GPS coordinate obtained from a postcode (eg using Multimap), and did so to locate our 2007 Shropshire holiday cottage.  Usually this pinpoints a location fairly accurately.  However, on this occasion the GPS position was some 200 meters to the South West of the actual cottage.  It's probably an issue with the postcode system rather than GPS, but something to be aware of.

Geocaching
There's an engaging spin-off hobby from GPS called Geocaching.  It's best described as a fun and educational recreational activity, a treasure hunt that uses a GPS receiver to find, typically, a box with goodies in.  See the entry on Wikipedia for a full description.  Here at micbinks we contribute to the Geocaching community on: www.geocaching.com and enjoy searching out locations both local and when on holiday.

Geocaching can be environmentally friendly - 'cache-in trash-out' is where participants clear up rubbish from the geocache area (like The Wombles?).  It's a family friendly pastime and healthy for both mind and body, what with all the walking/searching/thinking that's required.  And it's highly educational - knowledge of navigation, topography, land use, GPS, mapping and the grid system is gained (oh, and where the local pubs are!).  Accepted practice guidelines are published by the Geocaching community.  Geocachers use PMR channel 2 or 8 to monitor for other Geocachers who may happen to be in the area.

We'll be posting images and links of our own Geocaching efforts on a new page in due course, er, once we're more established with the sport!

You can find the Garmin International website at: www.garmin.com
Other brands of Sat Nav include TomTom and Magellan.  Also there's GPS software available for PDAs and some mobile phones.

GPS related website resources and RSS feeds:
GPS: The New Navigation - explains how GPS works via an online game or computer app.
OS Net - resource for the precise GPS user in Great Britain.
GPS Receiver Information - reviews and information on GPS receivers.
GPS training - UK training courses in global positioning systems.
Geocaching - all about the worldwide treasure hunting GPS hobby.
Galileo - new European navigation system in development which uses 30 satellites to drastically improve signal availability and positional accuracy.
What is Galileo - BBC's Q&A on Europe's Galileo project (and further links).

Please inform us if you find deadlinks or dead RSS feeds above.
Also please let us know if you have any website suggestions.

© micbinks 2005-2007.  Please ask permission if you wish to reproduce any of this content in full or in part.

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