So tell me about the Garmin Rino.......

[Ropin4gold]

I am looking at getting 1 or 2 of these units. Have been looking at the 120 and 130. Anyone familiar with these and have an opinion on them?

[enfield]

Haven't used them, but Garmin makes the best GPS's, IMHO. The radio should give you fairly reliable communications over a couple of miles line-of-sight. If you have a hill between stations they won't work so well. Cell phones will work better if you can get a signal.

You might be less-than-impressed with the performance of the radio, but the GPS should be a dandy.

Edited December 5, 2011 by enfield

[Lumber_Jack]

Great gps units. Not sure about radio. Unless you really need the emergency weather data I would go with the 120 model. Both gps' will function identically. And unless you plan to download TONS of topo maps and such, 8MB of storage will be plenty.

I use the garmin map 60cx on a regular basis and for $200, there is no better handheld gps, believe me I've used plenty.

[Lumber_Jack]

Also if you ever find yourself in East Tn, I can upload topo maps of your region, I have USGS topos for the entire US.

[rgaper]

They're good stuff. Up at our hunting camp in the Adirondacks we have a standing rule that if you want to hunt there, you need to have a Garmin Rino. The 100-series radios are fairly weak and if you get into any kind of cover (pines for example) you'll lose your satellites real fast. It also seems that they take awhile to acquire the satellites. About 2 years ago I upgraded to the 500-series and it absolutely corrects all of the issues described above, but they're big bucks in comparison.

[gunrunner32]

Used these for a while, the 500 series I believe and they work great. I've been able to use the radio feature just shy of a mile straight line distance and minimal structures between. The other nice thing is with both on the same channel you will get the grid location of the other gps when they transmit their radio traffic, makes it easy to help out hunting buddies. It's a little bulky though, I've also got a garmin etrex vista and foretrex 401, no radio feature on those though.