Dual-purpose GPS

I've had a Garmin GPS-V for a long time and thought it was a very nice compromise between being big enough for car navigation and small enough for hiking. However, there were a couple of weaknesses in the GPS-V I'd hoped Garmin would fix. One was the small memory size, which could only hold maps large enough to satisfy a typical car trip of a couple of hours or so. Any more and you would drive outside the detailed map area, requiring a reload from a laptop or something. This led to the second weakness, the serial interface, which was excruciatingly slow. The entire map memory, as limited as it was, would take over an hour to load at the maximum baud rate. Between these two "features", the GPS-V was severely handicapped for long trips.

The Quest solves both of these issues. Its 115MB memory is enough to satisfy long-range trekkers, and the whole thing can be loaded in a couple of minutes via the USB interface. The color display is easily visible in direct sunlight, and the colors are well-chosen for quick feature recognition. The case has the same front panel area as the GPS-V, but is much shallower. The Quest's patch antenna folds flush with the case, making the whole thing fit easily in a shirt pocket, and the built-in rechargeable battery is rated to last 20 hours. The cigarette lighter power plug includes a speaker which annunciates your directions. All in all, a very potent portable package for both car navigation and hiking.

There are a couple of downsides. First of all, all your GPS-V mounts won't fit it. The only mount currently available is the suction cup windshield mount included with the receiver which holds it at the end of a very long arm so that it tends to jiggle while driving. I hope this is supplemented in the near future by Garmin, I'd like to be able to use the Quest on my motorcycle like I can my GPS-V and its handlebar mount.

The power and antenna connector are also different from the GPS-V. The flush pins of the power connector are probably required to satisfy the improved water resistance of the Quest, but it's going to make it very difficult to utilize the receiver in all the situations owners would like to.

The software also seems to lack the feature of saving tracks, which can be a weakness for off-road and hiking applications. There is only one current track, which can be saved to your laptop and restored, but there's no place in the receiver itself to put it. On the plus side, there are some big improvements in waypoint management.