Garmin Etrex Handheld G P S

[Etch]

Has anyone else on AB got one of these? I have the eTrex 10, which is as basic as they come: its built-in map is pretty rudimentary and can't be upgraded. Out of interest though, I have been looking at the 'Cities' (i.e. towns) in different areas and found something odd. In France, the central and eastern parts include all the towns I would have expected. However, on the western side there are some notable omissions: Bordeaux, Angouleme and Le Mans being but a few. Is this the case on all eTrex 10s, or does it depend on the build standard?

[Buenchico]

The eTrex 10 has only got 8MB of memory. (A single image file from a modern digital camera might be around 8 MB, so you can see that 8 MB isn't really a lot of space for storing maps covering the entire world, plus all of the additional data that you want to store yourself). So a lack of detail in the maps provided is bound to be inevitable.

If you're prepared to do a bit of fiddling around though, there is actually a way to get more detailed maps onto the device:
https://the-hug.org/opus2434.html

[Etch]

I'm not that bothered about detailed map imagery, but thanks for the link. What I do want is 'points of interest' to give situational awareness when I'm out walking, and 'waypoints' provide that capability: details of waypoints are held in XML files that I can create and edit using Wordpad and then copy to the unit. For my local area here in the UK I have added waypoints representing villages and towns that are not in the map database. Obviously there is no need to duplicate information for 'cities' that are already in the map, which is why I have spent some time finding out which cities/towns it does know about. There are at least 270 French 'cities' in its map, so most are smaller than Bordeaux which surely must be one of the top 10 largest towns in France! I was just wondering whether it and the other towns I mentioned are also 'missing' on other units.