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Product Description
Manufacturer's Description
 Explore the great outdoors |
Exploring the great outdoors has never been easier with the Garmin Dakota 20 – even if you’ve never used a GPS handheld before. It is compact and light, fitting into the palm of your hand or you can attach it to a bicycle. The Dakota makes going on a walk or cycle ride fun and easy.
Basic handheld functions
Plot your trail – Save waypoints or favourite locations straight onto your handheld and Garmin will guide you there – just follow the simple, intuitive menu.
Plan your route – Devise routes on your PC and send them to your handheld for an effortless way to plan your journey.
Track where you’ve been – when you want to go back just choose the Trackback function and your handheld will direct all the way
Travel how you want, where you want – Get out and about on foot, by bike, in car or even on the water. The new touchscreen handhelds are ideal whatever the conditions or terrain. Simply touch the screen to select your activity and let you touchscreen handheld do the rest.
Why the Garmin Dakota 20?
The Garmin Dakota 20 has everything you need to go exploring and more.
3-axis compass
The compass shows your heading even when the unit is not held flat.
Barometric altimeter
A built-in barometer tracks changes in atmospheric pressure to pinpoint your precise altitidue. The altimeter screen plots elevation and profile. You can even plot barometric pressure over time to keep an eye on changing weather conditions.
Wireless data transfer
Dakota 20 allows you to wirelessly share routes, tracks, waypoints and geocaches between compatible Garmin Dakota, Oregon, Colorado and Foretrex devices, and is compatible with Garmin heart-rate monitors and cadence sensors.
Expand your experience
850 MB of free internal memory mean you can store up to 1000 waypoints, 50 routes, 2000 geocaches and an active tracklog of up to 10,000 points and 200 saved tracks.
The expandable microSD card slot provides extra storage for waypoints, routes and tracks. Can be used for extra mapping to give your Dakota turn-by-turn navigation on road.
 GB Discoverer topo-maps |
Other features
The Dakota 20 has a worldwide basemap so you can navigate anywhere with ease. It is waterproof and has a high sensitivity GPS receiver with Hotfix™ which means the Dakota finds your location quickly and maintains it even under tree cover or near tall buildings.
The enhanced sunlight-readable touchscreen is brighter and easier than ever to read and use in all conditions.
The Dakota 20 is very light at just 191g including batteries and has 20 hours’ charge from just two AA batteries.
See the bigger picture
You can even add topographical mapping such as GB Discover™ to your Dakota. Available as a plug-in SD card or a download, you can get 1:50,000 scale mapping for the whole of Great Britain in 3 regions – Southern England and Wales, Northern England and Midlands and Scotland.
With GB Discoverer you essentially see an Ordnance Survey OS Landranger map on the screen of your handheld, but it has the advantage of intelligent navigation. Use the touchscreen GPS to search, select and navigate to street addresses and attractions, follow routes on foot, in car or by bike all using the familiar Ordnance Survey platform. It even gives turn-by-turn directions when driving. See www.garmin.co.uk/garmin-gb-discoverer for more information.
Try geocaching
Geocaching is like a great outdoor treasure hunt that anyone can take part in. The Dakota 20 enables you to quickly download up to 2,000 caches, with information such as location, terrain, difficulty, hints and description — without the need for paper print-outs and manually entered coordinates.
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Customer Reviews
The touch screen interface works really well, but the screen inteslf can be difficult to see in some lighting conditions. It does not perform as well as the eTrex series colour screens. Having said that - it is not such a big problem that you should not purchase.
If you've read about the device having a Tide Time table - be aware that this only applies to the US. Even if you purchase the European unit, the built-in tide timetable is not for Europe, just for the US coast.
Also if you are using the device for walking and want to have an estimated time of arrival at your destination this does not appear to work with any pre created tracks (e.g. Memory Map, Base map tracks, etc). This may be a bug that is fixed in a later update, but this problem was reported to Garmin early October 2009 and it is still an outstanding issue.
On the whole a good robost device with a easy to use interface.
Just be aware that there are some issues, but hopefully some of these will be fixed by a future software update??
So to those problems. My first unit broke down after one day, the replacement unit from Cave & Crag arrived just a few days after I had returned the original. I thought the map update was slow and clunky and it kept bouncing around even when I was going in a straight line. The OS map is fixed to the device which means it cannot be loaded into Garmin's Mapsource software for planning routes. Trying to plan a reasonable walk on the device would take up to 40 minutes or more.
The replacement unit has been fine with only the rare system crash (I'd expected more in all the times I have used it). I got around the bouncing map problem by fixing the map to always show north as up. This probably saves a lot of battery as well; as it is no longer rotating the map but simply scrolling it. I found a free to use OS Openspace application that can be used for route planning and now it takes less than 10 minutes to enter a route and download it to the device. The application also uses the same OS maps as the device.
Since finding these work arounds I am now delighted with the device; which is very quick to gain a signal (much faster than my car sat nav), usually within 15-30 seconds, even under heavy cloud cover. The accuracy is really good as well. I've tested it's weather proofing with using it in light rain and snow without problems. I really like the way many of the applications can be customized so they show the information you require, and I have not had to calibrate the 3-axis compass or altimeter, they both seem to work fine out of the box. Not sure if the battery life is as good as they say, but it easily lasts a days walking with two 2700 mAh NiMH rechargeable batteries.
One problem I have found is not with the device, but if you upload a route into Mapsource and edit that route before saving it to the device, you cannot seem to navigate to that route using the device. This seems to be a bug in Mapsource.
Overall a brilliant unit which has already given me hours of pleasure with walking and caching, the book I use for walking now usually stays in my back pack as it is no longer needed; and this also gives me the ability to walk a route in the reverse direction to that given in my book.
1. The unit has lost memory three times - batteries have been full and I've loaded it with a route and it's just reset itself when I've gone to use it next. Very annoying if you've planned a walk and are relying on it as everything is gone - all setings, time, date, country, your route, waypoints etc. You have a new factory setting device.
2. The unit comes with what are called maps but I found them unusable - they don't even show footpaths. OS maps cost me £190 so not cheap as an extra. You can get free maps though from Open Streetmap Porject, but they're not perfect and third party open source maps.
On the plus side, I've found the screen usable, it's been reliable getting signals and I find the battery life good - it lasts for at least a day and easy to change being standard AA.
Overall I'm glad I have it and would probably buy agin at the price (as no better alternative I found), but it falls short of what I expected
Update March 2012:
The unit died suddenly and is frozen on bootup. Good customer services - posted it on Thursday, they've got a replacement to me on Tuesday two working days after it reached them. Searching on Google quite a few people seem to have had to return theirs so hoping this one stays good.
Quick pros and cons:
+ very light and compact
+ batteries last for about... Read more
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