Just a couple of GPS comments to throw in the mix, based on my experience over almost 10 years using my very old, very basic Garmin.

Using a stored " route" in the woods with a GPS is tough/impossible - because you need a certain amount of steady forward movement for the thing to track your direction. In otherwords, you have to walk a little ways off the route before it tells you that you' re off. When you' re dodging trees, stumps, logs, creeks, swamps, etc. you have virtually no steady movement so it doesn' t work well and you can easily end up being very frustrated.

On the other hand, my unit (and I imagine most) have a setting where you can have it put a dot with a label on the screen for nearby way points (e.g. car, deer stand, boat, duck blind) and another dot where I am at the moment. I simply look at the relative positions of the dots and adjust my direction up, over and around the obstructions. Kind of like having a beacon in the distance that you home in on - it' s not giving you a " route" , but an accurate goal.

In open country or on the water, the above doesn' t apply and you can use the features that actually set a route for you to follow.

In other words. the " track back" or route feature, I' ve found tough to use in the woods, but very usable on the open water.

My GPS is not a substitute for a compass - maybe some have compasses as well? Again, you need to be moving in order for it to give you a directional or compass reading. If you' re standing somewhere and you want to decide which way is " north" a compass works better.

On a river or in the woods, I' ve found GPS to be handy, but really as an adjunct for a good topo map (and compass, see above). It' s best if you can use a topo and a general awareness of where you are on that map using landmarks and compass without the GPS (which I luckily developed in the years of using topo maps w/o GPS). I always try to use the topo as if I didn' t have the GPS. If I' m hopelessly $&*ked up, I can use the GPS to get me close and the topo' s land features pinpoint after that.

All of this is especially true on a small twisty river - my GPS won' t give me an exact pinpoint if the bends in the river are tight and close together, but it will give me useful info, especially visavis important land marks like lakes we want to hike into, or waterfalls and rapids coming up.

My friends bought a set of the radio/GPS combo units from Cabelas and were dissatisfied with them and returned them. Don' t know brand or model or if they were defective, but they told me they just weren' t useful. They said the radio didn' t work nearly as well as a normal FRS or GMRS. As you know, return wasn' t a problem w/ Cabelas. To me, the idea of the combo units is excellent, and I' d like to try them myself.

99% of the time I use the absolutely most basic features: answering the question where am I and/or where do I want to go. Waypoints are handy. I use the speedo and distance traveled a *lot* and it is very accurate. (have the hand held semi-permanently installed in the boat). -zeke