Garmin Foretrex 301

No matter where your adventure takes you, you’ll never worry about getting lost with the Garmin Foretrex 301 hiking GPS. Garmin Foretrex 301 keeps track of your path and displays it as a dotted trail on the screen. Just turn on Garmin Foretrex 301 TracBack® feature, and you can retrace your path back to where you started. You can save locations in memory as waypoints (up to 500 of them), so you can always find your way back to any important place, like your campsite or vehicle. And with up to 18 hours of battery life and replaceable AAA batteries, you’ll never worry about making it back.

Cleverly simple, the Garmin Foretrex 301 is a slim wrist-mounted hiking GPS perfect for outdoor activities that require the use of both hands. Garmin Foretrex 301 combines a high-sensitivity GPS receiver, rugged, waterproof design and USB interface into a lightweight device ideal for hikers, skiers and campers.

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The GPS receiver in Garmin Foretrex 301  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 wide body airliner but it’s still much better than anything else I’ve tried.

The logging and interface are a little cumbersome in Garmin Foretrex 301, but that’s the trade off for making something this small and rugged (there are only four control buttons plus the one power button).

Garmin Foretrex 301 Features

Technical Details

The Review from the user about Garmin Foretrex 301:

This is a great and handy (handsfree) GPS receiver.

Pros: small, light, accurate, easy to upload and download data, will display up to 2 position formats at one time including Lat/Lon, UTM, GMRS…, Also, it saves data if the universal GPX format.

Cons: resolution a bit low, strap (limited adjustability) see below.

Notes: not a mapping or ‘turn by turn’ navigator, but it is not supposed to be. Will display tracks, straight line distance to destination, bearing to destination… everything you’d expect from a basic GPSr.

Review:
Garmin Foretrex 301is a great field GPSr. As a background I own a Magellan Meridian Gold and a Garmin Etrex Legend HCx and have used both extensively. I’ve been using the Garmin Foretrex 301 for about six weeks now.

I’ve usually used it for my running to track time, distance and speed. Also for trail hiking, cycling and basic navigation.

For basic navigation (ie inputting waypoints) it is best to use the Mapsource software. You can input waypoints and routes as well as extract tracks from the 301 using Mapsource. If you want to use it with other software, it will output data in the form of GPX which has become one of the industry standards in data formatting for GPS.

I’ve found it to be as accurate as my HCx but smaller and much lighter. It doesn’t do everything that the HCx does, but it was not designed to do so. The screen is small, but that is necessary due to the overall size of the device and so is expected. Also, due to the ‘uses’ and design (better power consumption), color dispay is not necessary. Resolution could be slightly better, but again for a simple device it works.

A price of <$140 is very fair for this device. I don’t think I would have paid the retail price when it first was introduced (~$200 I think). I considered the 401, but did not feel the features necessary, so saved my money.

The only con is the wrist strap. With the basic wrist strap, it just fits my wrist just right, but if your wrist is anywhere above average, it may be too tight. The unit comes with a wrist strap extender, but when I tried it, it made the wrist strap way too large for most anyone I know. It would be better if it had slightly more adjustment range. However, it is sturdy, seems secure so far (hook and loop) and comfortable for my wrist. Definitely recommended if you need a basic GPS.