I am looking at two gps units for flying. They are the Garmin Legend and Vista. The two main differences to me are one has 24 mb of memory and the other has 8 mb for mapping. There is about $100 difference between the two models and I want to know whether the memory difference is worth $100? How much area can 8mb represent? Is that enough to show the whole southeast US at once?

Thank you


Scot

Scot,

It may not help but my GPSMAP 60cs has 56mb of memory. I can hold 1k waypoints plus a lot of maps. It has a base map of major roads and can find and route you to cities. But the 'uploaded' detailed maps can find nearly anything with an address and route you there. The trade is memory. For that detail, I can fit all of Georgia in it. No room for more. But I can pick and choose grid squares to up load such as cities only - then I can go to and use it to visit numerous cities.

How much is enough? Mine works very well for me. Maybe someone will chime in about those models you're looking at which I imagine may be similar.

This might not help much either but.

As far as flying the base map on either one will do just fine the memory that your referring as Joebids said,is more for street level detail that you would load to the gps from one of the mapsource programs from Garmin I used metroguide for a while and if my memory serves me right 8meg is enough for most of the Atlanta area.

You would also be gaining the memory, compass ,and altimeter on the Vista
but those two units will not auto-route the streets them selves unless its a C model, if not then has to be done via computer from the optional software Metroguide, City-select ect.

Back when I was traveling a lot I used a Mag 315 to fly with and a Garmin Streetpilot III that I also used in the car, it had memory cards that I loaded different areas to different cards so I had detailed maps for where ever I was headed.

The draw back was the Streetpilot will not route a straight line from point a. to point b. so you can track that route, it will only give you a straight line from you to your destination which is not very useful for flying but the map was nice though.

I sorry I can't say about the Legand or Vista have never used them would be something to check out before you buy though. I would love a Garmin IQ36A but the price, maybe one day.

Hopefully you can hook up with someone that has the software that you will be using and they can load up the squares to see how much memory it will take for the areas of your interest, I would be happy to but I don't have the software any more.

Hi Scot,
I have both a Legend and a Legend C with 24MB of map memmory. As Skyman indicated, the 8MB available in the Legend will hold detailed MapSource maps for most of the Atlanta area, including everything inside I 285. The 24 MB map memory will hold most of north GA from about Macon north to the TN/NC border when route calculation data is not included. (The route caclulation data is used for auto-routing which I don't believe is supported in the Vista.)

For avation work, you may want to consider whether to just go with the base map included in either model. Route planning can be done with a seperate program and then each route transferred to the GPS allowing the route(s) to be drawn over the base map. Both models can be set up to give a good CDI-type presentation.

Hope this helps.

Owl

My GPSMap76 with 8M is just marginal with respect to maps. I'd like to keep both metro Atlanta and North GA in the GPSr, but usually have to leave some parts off.

Since it doesn't have the USB connector, it can take 20-30 minutes to reload a different mapset, since unfortunately Mapsource insists on deleting the existing maps and reloading everything. Not a huge deal but irritating.

In summary, I'd pay extra for more memory.