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The Garmin Oregon series are excellent. The gps is very well designed, with an excellent user interface, the touch screen is a real bonus and makes this unit a pice of cake. there is a certain amount of learning, but this can be said with any new item. This one is a lot quicker to get to grips with, with the added garmin topo maps it easy to find your way around whatever area you are in. I brought this mainly for Geocaching and it handles these tasks with ease, it works very well as a sat nav showing the route to all the places i need to find. the only minus points i can find is that it does not have postcode search, and the route planning does not allow for bigger vehicles than cars/ motorcycles to be entered so i can forsee problems when towing my caravan and it sends me down tiny country lanes. The manual could be better,which would allow for faster learming but there are a few tutorials on you tube which did help. this unit is by far the easiest to use of the garmin range of hand held GPS's, i have owned several and this is the BIZ. I would recomend you down load the latest firmware up dates, and currently the beta 2.98 update makes the unit much better to use adding a few nice features. I would recomend this unit to anyone wanting to underatke out door adventures, geocaching Cycling Treking/Hiking sailing infact anything that needs a compass or map. The only complaint which is not with the unit, but the available maps which are not as detailed as O/S maps is the price. The garmin topo maps are around £60 and if you want to go to an OS quality map they are £130 and do not cover much of the country,come on garmin get your act together. If you are thinking of getting a GPS, Buy one of these you wont regret it i promise.Read full review
My original GPS was a Magellan Tracker, loved it but it was becoming a little dated and always suffered from poor signal under tree cover etc. Reviews seemed to favour Garmin over Magellan for current signal gathering performance so I went with the Oregon 300. Considered the Dakota but do not like glossy screens due to reflection etc (mistake first made with LCD flatscreen pc monitor) Out of the box the Oregon fired up quickly and certainly has better signal capture than my old Tracker. Many reviews had concerns regarding screen visibility, you will need to employ the backlight and, in common with all mobile colour screens I have seen, they are poor in contrast with monochrome - but I guess progress has to happen !! Loads of features I haven't touched yet, screens take some navigating around/getting used to where all the info is (you know you've seen it but buggered if you remember which screen it was in !!) On board map is very basic, I'm sure you will want to improve on the resolution for the area you are interested in; Garmin OS Maps are about £150 I think, there is a free map set of the UK, contributed to by the Scottish Mountain Council (apologies if it is entirely your work chaps) that is perfectly good enough for most occasions (it even has my local pub marked) OS maps are also available from other sources, I purchased a section of 25 000 OS from Anquet but BEWARE, you cannot load the map onto your GPS (only Garmin have the maps to allow this) Instead you plot your route etc on your pc then upload the waypoints/routes into your Oregon. A little disappointing but I guess inevitable when considering the price difference. The rout will show up on the free UK map mentioned earlier. Finally, my other concern was 2d or 3d compass ie am I bothered about having to hold the GPS horizontal to get a compass bearing? The Oregon 300 has to be held flat, but I have not found any problems with that so far. One curious feature of the 300 is temperature - there is a feature to dispay Water Tempertaure but apparently not air temperature - have I missed something? Hope you've found this useful. happy navigating.Read full review
After owning a Vista CX, I decided it was time to upgrade. The Oregan 300 is incredibly easy to use, due to the touch screen. Every function can be operated with just your thumb. A little dissapointing was that the basemap had so little detail, and the price of TOPO UK a bit on the high side. However, overall a well designed piece of kit, Highly Recommended!!!
Good points: OS maps are great, set the zoom level to that of the map, with north up and they look very good. Very fast satalite aquisition. Feels good in your hand. Not as good but not that bad: The screen needs to have the backlight on maximum for best visibility, set the time out on the backlight or you will eat batteries. You cant use a USB power adaptor and the standard usb lead as a car power suply, you will need to purchase a dedicated power lead. Also: The screen is difficult to see in bright sun, you have to get the sun behind you and then angle it to remove the reflection, then it is quite clear with no backlight
Despite it is a discontinued product, it's still actual and it is the right GPS for me. It's easy to use, the display has the right size and it's very good for people that like to make hiking or bicycle trips as I do. It's very robust and it works fine under severe weather conditions, like rain and I really recommend this Oregon 300 if you still can find it used here on the ebay.