Magellan eXplorist 200 16MB Handheld GPS Navigator Review

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Hey Expo. What's up? The next thing I have here is the GPS eXplorist, eXplorist 200. This is by Magellan. You can pick this up at Radio Shack for $149, or on Amazon.com for about $100. It's really good for using as a normal GPS. It has some built-in road maps, but it's generally the main roads, like highways and interstates and whatnot. But what I happened to have gotten it for is geocaching. You don't know what geocaching is, it's a website that basically plots GPS locations where there's a treasure. So you go there, and you find it. The big thing that's important with that, though, is having a good GPS. And the one that I have here can generally find the location within about 10 or 15 feet, which is really good, because by the time that you're in 10 or 15 feet, you will find whatever the package is that you're looking for. So it's really, really good. Another great thing about it is that it has the tracking rod, so you can actually plot points on the actual map where there's highways. I have my house on here, several of the other geocaches, neighbor's houses, stores and whatnot. It also has the built-in compass, and it has also how fast you're walking and the distance to your point, which is really cool also. It's not a digital compass that says north or anything like that. It actually looks like a normal compass, a real compass that you hold in your hand. So I think that's pretty cool. It also shows which way is the sun setting, and you can face that way and whatnot. It also has a built-in backlight, so it has two levels of the backlight. Also, a great thing about it, I was out geocaching the other day, and it happened to be raining. This one is waterproof. So if you're out in the rain, and you need to find out where the hell you're going, use that. It's really good. So just put on the backlight, stand in the dark, you're good to go. You can find your way back. And it has the trace route, which is really good. It plots all the points. You turn left and it plots that point automatically. And then you can set it in here to actually backtrack, which is really cool, because then you can take your exact same steps going all the way back to wherever you parked your car or back to camp. I haven't found any flaws with this yet, which is really odd. The battery life, I've had these batteries in here for at least three, maybe five weeks now, and it's only about three-quarters of the way down. And that's really amazing, even with the backlight and constantly being on. It connects to, I believe, a maximum of about ten satellites, so that'll give you, I think, a radius of about one to three feet; so that's pretty cool. It usually works pretty good underneath the trees, like above me, you see. Usually, if you get the satellites before you walk under the trees, you've got to stand in the open sky. That's the same with all GPS's. It doesn't have any voice on it or anything, so you can't really use this for figuring out how to get to grandma's house or anything like that, but this is really good for the woods or the woodsman at that. So this is a Magellan eXplorist 200. Now, I know the 300 model has a USB interface that you can actually upload new maps and software to, but the 200 is the base model. So if you're looking for that sort of thing, I would say get the 300. But this is the 200, and I recommend it heavily. Go get one.