The Garmin 650t Montana is one of the newest handhelds on the market with all the bells and whistles. Being a handheld it has many uses from the car, motorcycle, boat, geocaching or just hiking. This unit can be powered by a rechargeable lithium battery pack or by AAA alkaline batteries. What makes this unit different is it can cycle through different display dashboards from the Garmin Nuvi systems, automotive, altimeter, compass, recreational, stopwatch, large or small data fields, status, satellite, geocache and custom. With so many different option one can set this unit up for any type of use. While your using this device you can stop and take a picture with it's built in 5 megabyte camera to put in as a reference point(waypoint), so you can backtrack. It can except all the different maps available from Garmin as well as open source maps, from www.openstreetmap.org. The t in the name of the 650t represents topo, this unit has a 100,000:1 or 100K Topo Us maps as the default map. This map is displayed on a 4" color touchscreen which can rotate portrait or landscape, which makes this unit very versatile. The unit is wrapped in an rubberized armor and ports are accessible through lift up rubber hatches, which makes it waterproof up to IPX7 standards, but it will not float. The ports available are a usb charging/data port, an optional antenna port and a speaker port. The unit has 3.5 gigabytes of memory with the capacity to add more via a microSD port located in the battery compartment.
At first this unit may seem daunting to use because of all the features but once used the ease of use becomes apparent. The advanced shortcut features are easy to navigate, the homescreen is fully customizable, the controls are adaptable and the menus are reorder able. The high sensitivity gps antenna can pick up the 12 tracking satellites very quickly, it will even pick up more than half while indoors. This unit has a built-in 3 axis electronic compass, so if for some reason there is no satellite tracking the compass can still be used for navigation. This unit is a dream for geocaching as it will give heading and distance to the hidden cache providing the coordinates are correct of course. More information can be found at http://sites.garmin.com/montana/
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