Title says it all really. I'm looking to get a good budget (around £150) handheld GPS device. I've been looking at the obvious ones - Magellan, Garmin etc.

Has anyone got one or had practical experience of using one?

Cheers
Chris

Chris,

I've got an aged (3 year old) Garmin GPS12. Easy to use, quick to acquire sats, battery life not bad (I've also got a power lead for the car) a lot more accurate now more sats have been declassified. On the whole I find they are like mobile phones, they all do basically the same thing, just in slightly different ways, with different menus (eg Motorolla menus are cr@p, Nokias are very intuitive). This will not be a helpfull comment, but try them out in the shop car park, look through the manual in the shop to see which "you" are happy with. I picked mine on price, battery life, size and perceived performance.

Whilst out of the budget, a Compaq iPaq, a CRUX-II GPS card and Autoroute 2002 make a pretty good combination. Colour screen, accurate to which side of the road you are on, and you've got an iPaq to play with as well ;)

I think that Garmin are better the Magellan (in a similar way to that mentioned above, where Nokia are better than Motorola!).

For small, portable models, the eTrex is brilliant - i only have the basic one, but top of the range includes maps, alti/baro-meter, compas etc.

Check out http://www.garmin.com/outdoor/index.html for the range.

mb

I've got a Garmin GPS12XL which is excellent. When I was deciding what I wanted I found a huge amount of info at http://joe.mehaffey.com/. The site is run by a couple of real GPS anoraks and seems to cover just about anything you could ever want to know about GPS - including product reviews etc.

G

Thanks chaps - knew I could rely on Scoobynet :)
Cheers GM I'll have a look at the site you have suggested.

Chris

I've got a Garmin GPS III+.

It is very good but probably over your budget. Like everything in life you generally get what you pay for so do your research first and you might want to get a more expensive one.

The Garmin web page (www.garmin.com ?) is very useful.

I can get free software updates from the web for mine which is cool.

So does Autoroute 2002 do full turn by turn guidance based on the gps location, or is it simply another 'pointer on the map' effort??

Anyone used any of the iPaq turn-by-turn SatNav solutions and recommend one?

Top quality website GM :) I've now ordered a Garmin eTrek, so I'll let you know how I get on.

Thanks again for all the replies

Cheers
Chris