I anticipate the delivery of my Garmin Venture HC unit shortly and I'm doing some pre-installation inquiry. As per the specs, Garmin states that the unit contains 24 MB of memory. Will this be sufficient memory to load the State of Florida Topo map onto the unit?
I am guessing that it won't be enough for the whole state. That's a real problem with the Venture HC, 24MB is really tiny by today's standards. I had a Legend C a number of years ago which also had 24MB and it wasn't enough to load all of the Garmin New Jersey 100k topo.
Garmin has positioned this model at the bottom of the line and it is priced accordingly. But many people are frustrated when they learn the limitations. If you can return or exchange it then you might give that some serious consideration IMO.
The download for the FL TOPO from GPSFileDeopt is 126Mb +/- so I would think you won't be able to get complete coverage using that mapset with that GPSr.
Just to expand on what I said a bit, sorry if I came off a little harsh. But I really don't think 24MB is adequate anymore and it puzzles me why Garmin released this model recently. I mean, come on guys, you can buy 2GB SD cards for under $5.00 retail today. Surely they could have put 256MB in this model (ten times as much memory) and only increased the cost by a dollar or two.
Almost makes me wonder if this is some kind of "trojan horse" where they figure you will be back to buy another model after a year or so of frustration with the 24MB memory limit. Ten years ago, 24MB seemed fine since that was the norm. But today it's pretty sad. If you were going on a trip that covered a hundred miles with stops along the way to explore, you couldn't even load all the maps you need.
If you exclusively wander in an area near your home, it's probably OK. But I think your money would be much better spent on a model which has a memory card slot, like the Hcx series. The cost is not much more, and it will be something you should still be happy to use a few years from now.
Thanks for your help. Sounds like the HCx is the way to go! Boyd, no offense taken you made a valid point.