Our Garmin eTrex Legend H GPS Review
This Garmin eTrex Legend GPS is compact at only 4.4 inches high, 2.2 wide, and 1.2 thick. It is lightweight too, tipping the scales at only 5.4 ounces with a pair of AA batteries installed. The unit fits nicely into one hand and can be operated single-handed without blocking the screen with your fingers.
Garmin eTrex Legend H Handheld GPS The eTrex uses a 2.5-inch 4-level gray scale screen with a very high 160 x 288 pixel resolution. The screen is a well-defined portrait layout that is nearly twice as high as it is wide. This combination made small fonts appear sharp and clear. The only issue we noted was how small some of the text actually was, people with less than perfect near vision may have some trouble reading onscreen details with this unit. We found the screen easy to see view under all lighting conditions. No pushbutton backlighting is provided. Five pushbuttons and a joystick control this advanced eTrex. Three buttons are side-mounted on the left, with two on the right, and the joystick on the front panel. Symbol-type labels for each button is molded into the plastic on or near the pushbutton. Too bad Garmin retained the black on black color scheme from earlier version as it offers little contrast and can be hard to see in low light. We prefer clearly marked pushbuttons on the face of the unit. In our opinion, the side-mount buttons can be more difficult to use and see. The front panel mounted joystick adds an extra dimension to the control and operation of the eTrex. It functions as both a four direction rocker switch and a dual function pushbutton. A really handy software tool built into the joystick operation allows the user to build a waypoint at the current position anytime by simply pressing and holding the joystick button in. The first time we turned on the unit it took about a minute to locate our position. On subsequent uses it locked on in a few seconds. We found the Garmin eTrex Legend H GPS easy to operate. It uses three main pages to access data. Each sequential push of the page button—the upper button on the right-hand side—takes you to the Map, Compass, and Menu pages. The Map page displays a basic land and road map in the areas we checked. This unit does have 24 MB of internal memory for the storage of optional maps. On the Compass page you’ll find a compass rose with rudimentary markings at the cardinal headings covering the lower two-thirds of the page. Above you’ll find data boxes, you can display two, three, of four boxes with user selectable data points. The last main page is the menu page with sub-menus for Mark, Waypoint, Route, Tracks, and Setup. The page list and sequence is user adjustable so we added the Trip Computer page to the mix on our test unit. The Trip Computer page displays navigational data using either four or nine data boxes. All are user selectable from an internal list of over 30 data points. A utility page, Satellite Status, show signal strength with a simple bar level meter. Both the battery compartment and USB data port connection are on the rear of the case. The Garmin eTrex can store up to 1000 waypoints and 20 routes. The Garmin eTrex Legend H GPS Smart GPS Reviews HOME
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