I had the Garmin Foretrex 101 and it worked great until it got stolen. I have the 301 now and it works just as well. The only problem I had with the 101 was the strap. It was held onto the GPS unit with crappy watch pins. I’m in the military, so if you have to put a heavy ruck on and off quickly, and you get the ruck strap caught on the GPS, the unit would pop off the strap. Then, you are trying to find a tiny watch pin with NVGs on a mountain. Also, the strap that comes with it is just a bit too short, but the extension strap makes it too long. WTF?! It will barely fit on your wrist with nothing under it, but if you have a uniform on (ACU/BDU) you will have to use the extender and then it’s too long and will move around.

For the 301 there is a better design to hold the strap onto the GPS. It uses screw in pins, so I think that problem is fixed and it shouldn’t pop off. However, the strap length is still too short or too long. I am going to just buy a case where you can take the GPS and put it inside of a clear case and that has a Velcro strap.

I used the 101 on every mission in Afghanistan and it was really great to get quick grids of your location. Projecting points on the 101 and the 301 isn’t that easy though. You can only choose distances at 100 meter intervals, so that’s as accurate of grid as you will get. It’s also not very easy to navigate the menu to get at the project waypoint screen. I just used it to quickly find out where I was, and for that it was fantastical.

The sensitivity of the receiver is awesome. You can pick up signals when it’s sitting on the passenger seat of your car or when your in the woods walking. I ride mountain bike, and it seemed to work OK when I was under moderate cover at all speeds. When you get into really thick cover and you are going pretty fast the accuracy degrades a little, but it still tracks satellites. Your speed won’t be that accurate though.

Hooking it upto a computer is easy too. It just loads as a USB mass storage device, so you don’t need serial ports anymore. For military, I’m not sure if it will still be compatible with moving map on Falconview, haven’t tried it.

I definitely recommend this. The only problem is the crappy strap that’s not meant for human-sized wrists. On a bike mount, in a different case or attached to your body armor or whatever it’s awesome.

Very happy with this little guy. I chose the 301 over the 401 because I wanted to track things based on GPS altitude and NOT barometric altitude. Specific example: pressurized aircraft cabins will not read correct altitude on the 401 because it’s barometric… the GPS readings are slightly less accurate but ideal for what I needed.

There are lots of free software tools that read the GPX format that this device uses. You can also edit the onboard .gpx file directly if you really know what you’re doing, which is very nice for bulk imports, etc. Just copy a valid .gpx file into the “GPX” folder (one level ABOVE the one that you download in the first place).

The GPS receiver is much, much more sensitive than earlier generations. It locks on to satellites in much less time, holds the signal better, and works through more overhead cover. This does NOT mean that you can take it into a cave and get a signal, nor will it work in the center of a widebody airliner… but it’s still much better than anything else I’ve tried.

The logging and interface are a little cumbersome, but that’s the tradeoff for making something this small and rugged (there are only four control buttons plus the one power button).

All in all, I’ve been exceptionally happy with mine.

I love this product as it does exactly what I wanted: I wanted to go on a hike and be able to “display” the hike on a map and see the exact distances. Then I could print the map and let other friends take the hike too. The unit perfectly meets this requirement. Using the map portion is trivially easy by logging into Garmin/Connect, which is a free Internet based product. You punch a button on the web page and it downloads the contents of the unit to their database, all over a USB cable Once you do, you will see thousands of other users’ hikes, bike trips, etc. in your area and all around the world.

I admit to getting a bit lost once in a while and there’s a neat feature to “take you back” to the start of the hike, either by walking you back the same trail or giving you a compass heading and distance.

Customer service is unbelievable. Quick email answers. Once they even called me to talk about the issue I had questions about. Wow. Many other companies, your query simply goes into a black hole. I have had K cars where I couldn’t get info and these guys call me on the phone about their 0 product.

No, I don’t work for Garmin but I do have a Nuvi for my car.