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I have £100 to spend at Evans. I've talked myself out of a jump frame that I'll never use (Charge Iron) and I can't quite bring myself to buy a tons worth of drivetrain, so my latest thought is that a GPS might actually be really useful.
I want to use it for a combination of biking and walking, including multiday camping / bothy trips. I'm much more interested in navigation than Strava and such, though that would be a nice bonus. Budget is £100, plus maybe a smidgen, and it has to be from Evans.
This seems to give me the option of the eTrex 10 or the Dakota 10. The Dakota looks MUCH more useful - a quick bit of reading suggests that I can put OpenStreet maps on it and get a pretty useful wee navigation device. I usually do pretty well at getting lost just using a map and my brain, but bigger trips to places I don't know so well in potentially horrid weather do make me think it could come in handy.
Does anyone have the Dakota? Is it any cop? I doubt I'll use it that much, so I don't really want to spend that much more on it.
If you can stretch your budget to £150 then go for the Etrex 20.
I quite possibly could aye. What're the advantages over the Dakota?
I picked up a Dakota 10 off eBay to use mainly for geocaching. I don't use it often for navigating on bike rides (Her Ladyship has an Edge 800 for that, I just follow... 8) ), but it has come in useful as a "road-atlas-in-my-pocket" type of thing when away, and also as a tool on an archaeological project I've been working on.
I use the Open Source maps from [url= http://talkytoaster.info/ukmaps.htm ]TalkyToaster[/url], and sometimes wish I'd gone for a Dakota 20 which has expandable memory via an SD slot - the 10 can only handle one other map in addition to the default "basemap", so you can't install several mapsets (say OpenStreet, OpenCycle, OpenMtb, and my current favourite, the "OS 1:50k Look and Feel"), and swap between them in the field.
Other than that, it works well, even for a Luddite like me who's not a fan of touch-screens, and battery life seems good on rechargeable NiMhs.
Cool - sounds pretty good, although reviews of the Etrex 20 are pretty tempting - the lack of an SD slot in the Dakota is putting me off a wee bit.