You’re looking for a hand held unit, color or B&W screen is your choice. I'd suggest sticking to one of the two major brands (Magellan and Garmin) as you might want to start accumulating some software which can be brand specific and various adapters which are brand specific. My preference for ease, low cost, and portability would be the Garmin eTrex series (Magellan‘s eXplorist is a fine line too). If the two of want to do this together then consider the Garmin Rinos which have a walkie talkie integrated to the GPS, sort of a nifty gadget as you can also find each other using these! Start out by keeping it simple. There is plenty to learn and experiment with so you really won't get bored with the base models. And, they never become obsolete! After all, a GPS signal is and always will be a GPS signal. The only thing you really get for the more expensive models are features like altimeters, barometers, thermometers, blah, blah, none of which will make the GPS iteself any better at finding a cache!

My further advice is to consider that your handheld GPS is just that, for hiking/biking and the like. Your car GPS is for you car and to try to mix the two (many models do this) makes for a bigger handheld with more feature than you need on the trail and fewer features than you want in the car.

My handhelds are eTrex Vista and GPS 60CSx and my car units are Magellan (inventors of the fabulous Hertz NeverLost interface). I interface all units to Google Maps & Google Earth, Microsoft Streets & Trips, and the maximum detail USGS topographical maps available thru TOPO!/National Geographic as well as hoards of data converters and POI converters.


-- Edited by RVDude at 21:46, 2007-11-08