[night0wl]

I have the 76 CSx as a backup GPS. Its a decent unit as a second GPS for my boat...my Raymarine Plotter + Raystar is my primary. $100 is for Bluechart and one region...if you want to use it for land navigation, you'll need to get Garmin City Navigator NT as well. Thats more money. What I like about it is that its rugget, it floats, and it hooks up nicely with my Mac (running Parallels for all the software). Also, my version of the 76Csx has micro-sd cards for storage. While the box said 128 mb storage card included, a nice surprise was that I had a 256 mb card. Even then, I went to Office Depot and picked up a 2 gb card for $10 and use that now.

What I *DONT* like is that with a lot of maps, the unit can be slow to load up. Also, the menu navigation is a bit clunky...definitely not an iPhone U/I at all. The screen is old technology so a bit grainy/not as bright as you'd like. Most of all, though, is I dont like (nee...HATE) garmin's software! Mapsource no longer works under-way, so its fine for just planning purposes, but if you want to track progress on your laptop, you're SOL. For that, you have to run nroute. But then nroute only works with the last generation of Garmin products (Bluecharts 2008.5). Nroute does NOT work with City Navigator 2008 NT! Also, its tough to interchange waypoints between Garmin and Raymarine. It can be done...but again, lots of hacks.

You can do all sorts of hacks to get around compatibility of maps as well as vendors, but why Garmin took away the ability to do planning *AND* tracking from Mapsource is a bloomin' mystery to me.