Rating  - Magellan X200 Si! Garmin E trex No!
I went elk hunting with my new Magellan eXplorist 200 and 3 buddys who all owned Garmin E trexi (Plural of E trex). I was able to mark spots and name them before my buddys were even able to mark them. Accuracy was essentially the same.
Rating - Good GPS
This was a very good and accurate GPS unit. Sturdy and well made. Batteries lasted a long time and it found the satellites pretty quickly. Some of the functions such as setting it to coordinates you wanted to find was a bit awkward it worked flawlessly. I ended up selling it on E-bay as I wanted a unit with a more detailed map. The new unit has a better map but is not as accurate as this Magellan was.
Rating  - Magellan Explorist 200
Nice things about the explorist is it's cheap, ruggedly simple, good screen resolution, nice hand fit, good satellite fix and much better than Garmin's old chips'fitted gps. Great for outdoor adventure.
Downside is, low resolution track logging. Can't beat Garmin's Etrex features.
Rating - A pleasant surprise
I'm a hard-core Garmin fan. I own 5 Garmin receivers ranging from the old GPS 12XL to the newest GPSmap 60CSx. But for the second edition of my book, "Outdoor Navigation with GPS," I was committed to including information about a broader range of receivers. Since Magellan again refused to loan me an evaluation unit, I decided to buy this inexpensive receiver. Not expecting much, I put it though its paces and was pleasantly surprised. It's fairly easy and intuitive to use, lightweight, and rugged. True, it doesn't have any kind of computer interface port or external power port, but for a casual geocacher or hiker, it works just fine. I had no problem learning to use it in just a few minutes, once I figured out that Magellan uses the term "Points of Interest" instead of the industry standard term "Waypoints." (When will Magellan ever settle on a standard name? On their older units they called them "Landmarks.") The grayscale screen is easy to read both indoors and out, and the buttons are easy enough to use. I like the fact that Magellan has provided dedicated "MARK" and "GOTO" buttons rather than burying the functions way down in a softkey menu, something that certain other manufacturers could take notice of. The built in maps are more of a marketing ploy than really useful. They don't have enough detail for highway navigation and without a computer port there's no way to add more detail. There are a few other minor quirks like a user interface that is inconsistent in how you enter numeric data. All in all, though, it is much better than I had expected. I brought it along for a GPS navigation class I recently taught and found that inexperienced GPS users could quickly master it. It's not the choice for the serious GPS navigator, but for the casual user who won't need to connect it to a computer, it may well be sufficient. My original plan was to sell it as soon as I was done writing the manuscript, but now I'm seriously considering keeping it.
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Customer Reviews for Magellan,eXplorist200,763357109375,0763357109375,B00029TN9S, |
