Legend or Vista HCX?

[revrob]

I'm looking to purchase a garmin hcx vista or legend.
I've got a 305 edge, but am planning to do a 400K audax this year, which has a gpx file to aid navigation, and the 305 battery life won't cope with this.

In a nutshell, what is the difference between the vista and the legend?

Is it worth getting the topo maps on an sd card as well, or should I just use the opensource ones?

Many thanks for all your assistance.

[saturn]

Just use OSM - if some of the roads you use aren't yet mapped you can add them when you get back.

[border-rider]

Can you run the 305 off an external battery pack, via its USB port ?

[Cyclops]

Can you run the 305 off an external battery pack, via its USB port ?

Yes there's various chargers you can buy or you can make your own with a battery holder, mini USB lead and a soldering iron.

[frankly frankie]

In a nutshell, what is the difference between the vista and the legend?

The Vista has a barometric altimeter and electronic compass, the Legend doesn't.

Neither feature is particularly useful, given both tend to have calibration issues, and that a (moving) gps without these features can still give you your direction and altitude.  
And they are both a small battery hit, though battery life is still very good so that's not really an issue.

However you do also get this screen with the Vista

which the Legend can't do.

I don't think the topo maps are very good value.  In fact all the current Garmin maps are a bit of a rip-off.  Look for an old or s/h copy of Metroguide, which is good value (no locking issues).   I don't think OSM is a viable alternative yet (though a very fine and worthy project, obviously).

[andrew_s]

In a nutshell, what is the difference between the vista and the legend?

The vista has an electronic compass and a barometric altimeter, the legend doesn't.

The compass tells you which way north is. Without it you only know which direction you are moving in (i.e if you aren't moving you don't know). Mainly useful for hiking.
The altimeter doesn't give spurious values when there isn't a good satellite signal, and isn't subject to the same random variations in reading as the GPS height. Useful if you are interested in getting reasonably reliable "total climbing" figures for your rides.

The compass and altimeter reduce the battery life by a bit. You can turn the compass off, but not the altimeter.

[revrob]

I'm not sure whether the 305 would be able to do navigation for me, if I wanted it to.

With external battery packs - I'm not sure how I could use one on the move, and would it still work in the pouring rain?

Does the legend do any elevation at all - without the barometric altimeter?

[frankly frankie]

Yes - it's (IMO) just as good - but you just don't have that option of viewing an elevation profile.

You can still see height, rate of climb, highest point so far, etc. displayed as data fields.

And the height is still written into your tracklog.

[nashd]

The Edge 305 will do navigation – either using route points to indicate turns, or following a course/track – it just doesn’t have any maps to show where you are. 

I didn’t get on with external battery packs with mine – the lead kept falling out, and it wasn’t obvious when the external batteries were running out (I think a firmware upgrade may have cured that).  However, on a 400k audax it was a bit too fiddly for me – I had enough problems feeding myself, never mind keeping a GPS topped up with batteries.  I went back to using a basic cycle computer for the long rides. 

I’ve just bought a secondhand Geko 201 which will get its first outing this weekend.  It’s similar to the 305 in that it has no maps, but it runs off replaceable AAA batteries.  It’s not as good at indicating turns – there are no beeps, so you have to keep an eye on the screen.

I think I’m also going to buy a Legend or Vista, or possibly a 60CSX.  The latter is larger and heavier, plus battery life isn’t so good, but the screen is a wee bit larger, and I like the buttons on the front, and the screen being at the top of the unit.

[saturn]

I don't think OSM is a viable alternative yet (though a very fine and worthy project, obviously).

I'd be interested why you feel that Francis - at least for audax purposes. I accept you might not want to do a 400km audax in a wholly unmapped area without a backup paper map but I'd be surprised if that was possible anyway. If you're navigating a predefined route in "off-road" mode you just follow the line, it doesn't matter whether there's a road underneath or not.

If you decided to pack part way round and wanted to find the shortest route back to the HQ, or the nearest town / train station you'd need to leave your pre-planned route of course but I'd be surprised if there was an area that didn't have sufficient roads mapped to enable you to do that reasonably well.

[saturn]

The compass and altimeter reduce the battery life by a bit. You can turn the compass off, but not the altimeter.

You can tell the Vista to use GPS for altitude (presumably this is the way the Legend does it) rather than the barometer. I don't know whether this turns the barometer off though or just ignores it.

[Sigurd Mudtracker]

I've got a Legend, and whilst very happy with it (much better than my original Summit - doesn't turn itself off randomly for starters) I occasionally wish I'd shelled out a bit more for the Vista - but I do live in a very hilly area, so ascent is a useful bit of info.   I find the GPS elevation data to be unreliable at times.

I've also got the Garmin maps on SD card in the GPS: now that I've worked out how to use Tracklogs to plan routes, it works pretty well.  Standalone it also does nifty things like "find the nearest cake shop" (well, not quite) that I find useful.  It also survived the transfer to another SD card so I can store tracks on the card as well and not be restricted by the GPS's memory.

And battery life is really quite remarkable - again another plus over the old Summit, which ate AA batteries for breakfast - despite a B&W non-backlit display.  But perhaps that was the altimeter?

[Charlotte]

I've got the Legend.  I lost my original one and replaced it with exactly the same model.  All you might miss is the compass and I wear a little mini compass on my watch strap anyway.

I have two micro SD cards - one with a recent build of open source maps and one with a dodgy copy of the Garmin metro euro mapping.  Sorted.

[Kim]

From experience, the compass in the Vista is useless when mounted to a bike - proximity to metal (even non-ferrous metal, it seems) confuses it.  But that's okay, because you can turn it off (which saves power) and the movement of a bicycle is such that GPS direction is usually correct until you dismount and start moving in un-bicycle-esque ways.  It is useful when hand-held though, at least for those "which way do I turn out of the station?" moments.

The barometric altimeter is more useful.  It has various modes, but the vast majority of the time you're likely to use it in auto-calibrate-against-GPS-elevation mode.  This effectively eliminates the erratic elevation readings you often get when GPS reception is a bit flaky, while using the GPS elevation to correct for slower changes in atmospheric pressure due to the weather.  It's pretty accurate, too, as long as you give the unit a few minutes to sort itself out on startup, or manually provide the elevation for an initial calibration of the altimeter.  It also gives you the elevation profile screen, which is quite nice to play with.

I have a *cough* offsite backup *cough* of the Garmin topo maps.  They're lovely to look at, but the SMC contour data (as included in andygates's Munky map) is nearly as good for getting a sense of the terrain, and can be used in combination with a routable map (Topo maps aren't routable).  As recently discussed, I've installed the OSM maps in Mapsource (alongside metroguide and topo) and have created a combined mapset that allows me to switch between the various maps (chiefly OSM + contours  or  Metroguide + contours, depending on whether I want detail or reliable routing) from the Garmin's menu without juggling SD cards.  Lovely.

[Wowbagger]

I've got the Vista.

My original one was replaced when the rubber housing came adrift. This was 2 years after I bought it. The replacement has a more recent copy of the operating system on it and better base maps.

I've got Mapsource on mine, covering a great deal of W. Europe(it took so long to load the maps on that I couldn't be bothered with the whole of Europe).

I like C's idea of having a separate sd card for OSM. I'll have to spend some money.

[Kim]

I like C's idea of having a separate sd card for OSM. I'll have to spend some money.

I figure that a couple of hours waiting for the computer to upload a combined mapset, indoors in the well-lit warm and dry beats swapping MicroSD cards on the road with cold fingers.  Especially as one of the obvious reasons for wanting to swap maps is because you need reliable routing to guide you to the nearest railway station as a bailout option.

Switching between maps is a few button-presses.

[Charlotte]

You're dead right on that, Kim.  How do I learn how to do this?

[Kim]

You're dead right on that, Kim.  How do I learn how to do this?

fuaran describes a method of installing the Munky tiles in Mapsource in this post.  I trust you're already familiar with the procedure for selecting map segments and transferring them to the GPS - just select segments from both maps.  Note you'll probably want to install and select the contours in Mapsource too.

[Charlotte]

Excellent - thank you 

[Kim]

The other thing to know (which isn't obvious or very well documented) is that you can select or deselect entire mapsets in one go, rather than scrolling through the list, switching tiles on and off individually.  Simply press the 'menu/find' button while in the "Map Setup - Information" screen, and you'll get a menu offering to hide or show the various installed maps.

Discovering this made me tremendously happy