Garmin eTrex H - Still Kicking

 I noticed that schlake still has and is attempting to use his old eTrex-h.

Damn, suddenly I have shit to say.

I have one of these! I've carried it all over the world. It's been useful and nice to have.

But I rarely use it anymore.

Compared to modern GPS units, I've been miserably disappointed by mine, except for the fact that it can be usable on alkaline AA batteries for almost 2 years, meaning one can leave it in the go-bag with a high certainty that it will actually give you it's position after it warms up.

However, I have found the overall experience questionable.

• It has to be in the very top of  backpack, facing up, or even outside. It will get confused in a pants pocket, in a car, or deeper in a bag. It also hates canyons and thick tree canopies.
  
• Without a basemap feature showing other landmarks, anyone with any skill can dead recon their location from a paper map faster than it can warm up and start tracking.
• The limited buttons mean that putting in target coordinates for finding things is frustratingly slow
• Accuracy is not great. Most waypoints can be found within a few hundred feet. Marking small objects is not advisable. If you're trying to help with citizen mapping projects, this GPS unit going to give you low quality data.
  
• Ditto saving and retrieving waypoints: I can't see enjoying geocaching with it.

 Upside:

• Basic function of turn-on at trail head, waypoint car and record track, then find way back is really the extent of it's utility.
• It spits out basic location data over serial every second or so: it's easy to write software to read/plot the position of the unit. 
• Not connected to the cloud: will work as long as GPS satellites are working. So early TEOTWAWKI fans should be good. As long as TEOTWAWKI isn't a magnetic field polarity reversal or other cosmic event.
  

Over time, I've shifted to using my smartphone, small spare battery, and gaiagps. While one has to pay an annual fee for the ability to save maps for offline viewing, the smartphones performance overall is just better, and I don't have navigational needs that really require a seperate GPS unit.

I've futzed a bit with using mine with GPSBable in linux. It works! But, not for anywork flow I can think of using the unit. One could easily pull the waypoints, and perhaps the route, from the unit and then use it other software like Google Earth, but once again, detailed notes on what the waypoints mean are going to be needed, as entering them manually into the GPS is very time consuming.

I have written some Labview and Python code to record the position from the serial stream and record them to a csv file for later viewing. I put a laptop and GPS in my backpack and rode the tractor and motorcycle around. It works, but i'm sure a USB GPS would do it better. Perhaps if it was set near a window, it could be used as an input to a NTP server on local network.

Frankly, it's somewhere between a curiosity and electronics recycling now.