Garmin eTrex Vista Cx Handheld GPS Receiver

I needed a gps just for hiking and waypoint marking, previous to this I owned a eagle explorer gps and a fortuna gpssmart w/Bluetooth, now the eagle explorer was a brilliant gps but size was an issue battery life was fairly good about 12hrs with high quality alkaline batteries, gps sensitivity was ok and was fairy easy to use. The fortuna (bought to replace eagle explorer due to smaller size and Bluetooth) was pretty bad the sensitivity was pretty bad and I had gone through 4 of them within a year rma-ing for repair as the signal just used to drop after a couple of months (the units were well looked after never dropped and always kept in the leather pouch), battery life was poor (4hrs w/bt 6.5 wo/bt), these units to my eyes were a sham and caused extreme amounts of headache I wouldn't even eBay it because of the amount of grief it had caused me, now on to the Garmin Vista CX, this is a great piece of kit good sensitivity (when I compared it to my globalsat Bluetooth GPS although globalsat's sirf-III blows away most if not all gps's on the sensitivity scale) I'm sure most people will be quite happy with this unit I know I was even though I found the eagle explorer easier to store waypoints, this just had way more feature on it especially vector mapping and navigation, altimeter and magnetic compass, battery life is exceptional as well about 18hrs, nice and compact, splash/waterproof, to me this unit could have been perfect if it had two more features, feature 1 would be nmea serial rs-232 output and feature 2 would be sirf-III chipset although the garmin chipset was pretty good and I found most adequate for most needs, overall the Garmin was pretty good and I don't think you would be disappointed with it.