Product Description

A staple among outdoor enthusiasts, eTrex Summit HC features a high-sensitivity GPS receiver for peak performance in any environment and includes 24 megabytes (MB) of internal memory, a detailed basemap, crisp color screen, barometric altimeter and electronic compass. Enjoy Clear Reception With its high-sensitivity, WAAS-enabled GPS receiver, eTrex Summit HC locates your position quickly and precisely and maintains its GPS location even in heavy cover and deep canyons. The advantage is clear ? whether you?re in deep woods or just near tall buildings and trees, you can count on Summit HC to help you find your way when you need it the most. Get Your Bearings eTrex Summit HC has a built-in electronic compass that provides bearing information even while you're standing still, and its barometric altimeter tracks changes in pressure to pinpoint your precise altitude. You can even use the altimeter to plot barometric pressure over time, which can help you keep an eye on changing weather conditions. Add More Detail eTrex Summit HC?s basemap contains lakes, rivers, cities, interstates, national and state highways, railroads and coastlines. Summit HC also includes 24 MB of internal memory, so you can load waypoints and routes from the included MapSource® Trip & Waypoint Manager software and add map detail from Garmin's entire line of optional MapSource® mapping products. Its 256-color, sunlight-readable display makes it easy to distinguish map details ? even in bright sunlight. eTrex Summit HC: Lock onto the great outdoors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27138 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Garmin
• Model: 010-00633-01   
• Released on: 2007-09-13
• Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, .2 pounds
• Display size: 2.1

Features

• The eTrex Summit HC from Garmin has functions that youwon't find on a traditional GPS
• Its barometric altimeter uses changesin pressure to determine your exact altitude, while the electroniccompass displays bearing information even when you are standing still
• The eTrex Summit HC is equipped with a colour screen and is the ideal companion for hikers,mountain climbers, hunters and any other active outdoorsy types! Internal menulanguages: French, English, Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian,Portuguese, Dutch, Finnish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Croatian, Greek, Turkish  

Manufacturer's Description
A staple among outdoor enthusiasts, eTrex Summit HC features a high-sensitivity GPS receiver for peak performance in any environment and includes 24 megabytes (MB) of internal memory, a detailed basemap, crisp color screen, barometric altimeter and electronic compass.

Enjoy Clear Reception
With its high-sensitivity, WAAS-enabled GPS receiver, eTrex Summit HC locates your position quickly and precisely and maintains its GPS location even in heavy cover and deep canyons. The advantage is clear — whether you’re in deep woods or just near tall buildings and trees, you can count on Summit HC to help you find your way when you need it the most.

Get Your Bearings
eTrex Summit HC has a built-in electronic compass that provides bearing information even while you're standing still, and its barometric altimeter tracks changes in pressure to pinpoint your precise altitude. You can even use the altimeter to plot barometric pressure over time, which can help you keep an eye on changing weather conditions.

Add More Detail
eTrex Summit HC’s basemap contains lakes, rivers, cities, interstates, national and state highways and coastlines. Summit HC also includes 24 MB of internal memory, so you can load waypoints and routes from the included MapSource® Trip & Waypoint Manager software and add map detail from Garmin's entire line of optional MapSource® mapping products. Its 256-color, sunlight-readable display makes it easy to distinguish map details — even in bright sunlight.

eTrex Summit HC: Lock onto the great outdoors.

Customer Reviews

Nice GPS - if you factor in the cost of maps
This is a neat and robust GPS, with a clear screen and easy to use.
BUT do not be fooled by the illustration as we were: to get the level of map detail shown on the GPS, you have to buy Garmin Mapsource Topo Great Britain for about £80. (You also need a DVD drive, and a lot of patience to get through the slightly flaky Garmin on-line licence key system.)
The maps themselves are an odd mixture of features for trekking: full contour information and tracks, but few OS-like land features such as churches. Loads of pubs, garages and nurseries (!) are shown, and you can press a couple of buttons on the GPS to get a list of those nearest you, complete with phone numbers!

Back to the GPS itself: if you're used to in-car SatNav, you may be disappointed to find that this one cannot calculate, or even download, a route from A to B along roads. But if you wanted that, you'd have bought a TomTom! This GPS cannot hold detailed maps for the whole of the UK (it only takes about the area of one large county at a time), but it only takes about 2 minutes to download what you need from a PC.

Having finally got the maps loaded, I'm looking forward to see if the GPS stops me getting lost on cycle rides and walks...

Have no faith in it
I'm on my second Summit HC, the first one going back as faulty as would only track for a short time before crashing and the replacement isn't much better, just going for slightly longer periods between crashes. It's not even immediately obvious that it's crashed because the display just stops updating - potentially dangerous if you're depending on it, and just very annoying if you were hoping to have a nice trail to view on Google Earth (or similar) after your walk/bike ride.
If it worked reliably it would be a good device at this price. It finds the satellites quickly (although is much slower to get a 3d fix if you want to see your route profile). If you set off as soon as it has a 2d fix, you can do a loop and find that you've finished hundreds of feet above/below where you started despite it being in the same place.
As stated, the Garmin maps that can be bought separately are terrible value for money. They're not cheap and are nowhere near as detailed as an O.S. map.
As you may have worked out by now, I had high hopes for this device and am very disappointed with it. Avoid.

Garmin eTrex Summit HC Handheld GPS
I purchased a Garmin GPS some years ago when they were rather new to the market. I have to say that I did not find it very useful since it needed a very clear view of the sky in order to get a fix (and even then it was slow), and it consumed batteries at an alarming rate. Things have clearly moved on a lot, and the Garmin eTrex Summit HC Handheld GPS proved on my recent trip to the Dolomites to be a reliable and useful aid. It established a fix quickly and reliably, and could maintin this even with the gadget in my trouser pocket. The battery life is excellent.

As others have mentioned, the menus are numerous and multi-layered and so take a while to get used to. I suppose that with only a few buttons available this is inevitable. You do need to spend a while clicking around to get a sense of where everything is. Being a man, I did not of course read the manual in the first instance, but this did not cause any problems.

I have not as yet loaded any more detailed maps so cannot report on that functionality. I was using the device to verify positions against a paper map.

Overall, I was pleased with the purchase and thought it good value.