Hi,

We are planing a 6 month trip round north Africa and then back through Europe.
The Garmin GPSMAP 276c was recomended to us as being the best GPS system to use for this.

After reading some of the other discussions about the speed of the Garmin V i am concerned that this newer one is not as good as i was lead to believe.

Does any one have any experience with this or can they recomend a better one before i buy it?

Please help.

Babs:

The Garmin 276 is a very capable, very modern and fast GPSR. It was designed primarily for marine use, but does a very good job when in automotive mode.

It's probably a more expensive and more capable GPS than you need for your trip. The big issue you have to consider with GPS use in lesser developed countries is the availability of cartography for that country.

All Garmin autorouting GPSR's share the same basemap* (the map that is burned into the GPSR and cannot be changed). This means that the basemap in the GPS V and the basemap in the 276 are the same.

Any GPSR - even the simplest one designed for kids to play with - will tell you where you are with great accuracy. In that respect, for auto travel, they are all the same.

If you cannot get detailed cartography for the places you are going (and that means any part of Africa, except for urban areas of South Africa), it's kind of pointless to get an expensive, autorouting GPSR. You might as well get a simple, inexpensive one, because you will be relying on paper maps, and the only value of the GPSR will be to confirm your present location.

I own a 296 (the aviation version of the 276) as well as a Garmin 2650. These are the two "top of the line" Garmin GPSR's. Although they have amazing capabilities in Europe and North America, they really don't tell me much more than my latitude and longitude when I am in Africa. I could get that with a $100 used GPSR.

PanEuropean

thanks for that.

we have found a site on the intrenet that sells GPS quite cheep as it comes straight from the factury and cuts out the middle man. this way the 276 only cost about a £100 more thwn the garmin V. since we are goining to comeback via europe and spend a lot of time there it will be worth the extra money i think.
thanks again.

I would be interested in that website...
What is the name of the website ?
cheers,
Gijs