Handheld GPS Reviews - Customer reviews - Garmin Etrex Venture HC GPS Receiver

Manufacturer: Garmin

List Price: $199.99
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Used Price: $129.99

Average Customer Rating: -

Product details

Offers (68)

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Spotlight customer reviews:

Name: Daniel A. Bowers
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
Date: 2008-11-02
Customer Rating: -

Summary: For the price...The greatest
Comment: When I saw the price of the Venture HC, I was in shock. $114.99 for one of the best gps units on the market today, is unheard of. This little yellow wonder can receive location signals even in dense forest, and in the deepest of canyons.
I bought one even though I own the Legend HC and Legend C. The reason....I'm in charge of a survey crew who's job is to recover survey markers, or as they are properly called, section and quarter section monuments. Some of the areas I and my crew look for these points are in the Wasatch mountain range just east of Salt Lake City, and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. These mountains are very rugged and easy to lose your direction. We upload the latitude and longitudes into the Garmin Venture HC and Legend HC and search the mountain sides. So far we have recovered most of the survey points we are looking for, thanks to our Garmin units. Without our handheld units it would take us a lot longer.
I cant say enough about Garmins quality, and the support is unsurpassed.

If your thinking about buying a gps unit heres a test you can do. Call Magellan's support line. What do you get?.......people who can hardy talk English. Now call Garmin. You are in Kansas, USA.

Name: L. Lim
Location: SF Bay Area
Date: 2008-11-05
Customer Rating: -

Summary: Fantastic GPSr for geocaching at the price
Comment: I got this unit for geocaching in urban and near urban areas. Garmin has some cheaper units, but they're either in B&W (not a big deal) or has a serial interface. I highly recommend getting a unit with USB interface unless you're running Windows 95 on a really old machine. Not only is the transfer speed much faster, some new machines (and many laptops) no longer has a serial port.

Performance of the unit is very good. It even managed to get a lock in my house, something my Nuvi could not do. Do bear in mind that the position is updated once every second, and the "compass" is only accurate if you're moving for a few seconds in a straight line. This is true for all GPSr that does not have an electronic compass.

The unit is small and fits very well in my hands - much easier than holding a Nuvi which I was using before this arrived. With the black case, it looks vaguely enough like a cell phone that people will not give you a second look when you're out hunting for a cache.

Waypoint names are 14 characters long, and it only holds 500 waypoints. Geocaching feature in this unit mainly consists of the ability to mark a waypoint as "found", after which you're asked if you want to go to the next closest waypoint. Searching for a cache would, by default, filter out found caches. And you can view the calendar to see when you found which cache - useful if you are logging your finds after a few days out hunting without Internet access.

The main limitations of this unit is : very limited basemap, no sensor, no memory expansion capability. There are units that has those features, but none come close to the price of the Venture HC. If you want those features, go for a GPSMap 60CSx - at almost 3 times the price. Or spend even more and get a Colorado or Oregon for paperless caching.

The Venture HC (and probably all other Garmin GPSr that takes AA batteries) can be used with rechargable batteries, but the unit itself cannot recharge the battery (you'll need to remove the batteries for recharging). If plugged into a USB port, the Venture HC will draw power from USB, and not draw from the batteries. I use Sanyo Eneloop low self discharge batteries and I haven't had to recharge them after a week of use.

My unit came with firmware 2.7 - updating to the latest (2.8 as I write this) is fairly painless. User interface takes a few minutes to get used to, not difficult at all. Garmin also has an application to make screen captures off the GPSr, and to customize the startup splash screen. A device SDK is also available for application developers.

For a (relatively) low cost entry to geocaching, I highly recommend this unit, with a set of Eneloop NiMH and the protective case.

Oh, and just a note, if you have a Nuvi, search for Nuvi Paperless Geocaching. You'll need the application GSAK and a premium account with geocaching.com, but that will give you the ability to view cache descriptions, hints and logs, together with proximity alerts and driving instructions to the cache, at your fingertip.

Name: Kimberly Ceplenski
Location: Glendale, AZ
Date: 2008-02-13
Customer Rating: -

Summary: Perfect for Geocaching
Comment: We use it for Geocaching. It is perfect. We are having lots of fun! Glad we bought it!

Name: J. Jarvis
Location: Texas
Date: 2008-03-11
Customer Rating: -

Summary: Best value for money
Comment: This is the ideal model. It is cheap enough but it has the better chip and the reception is great. Any cheaper would be a mistake because the color is an excellent feature. The next higher model is overkill because you do not want to spend $ 200 plus when you can get a car model GPS for $ 150. You cannot go wrong with this model.

Name: G. Zastrow
Location: Arlington, VA
Date: 2008-04-05
Customer Rating: -

Summary: Excellent value
Comment: Excellent value; I bought it for less than $140 and it's the best GPS I've ever had
The sensibility and acquisition-speed of the GPS are amazing. It has satellite signal even inside the garage! Maybe it's because of the new SIRFstar 3 sensor
It comes with a USB cable that is a lot more practical and fast than the old serial cables. And you can use the same cable to power the GPS too! Just connect it to a USB port of a laptop or better yet buy a 12v to USB car adapter

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