Bought it at Sam's Club

Author's Rating:

Pros: Ease of use

Cons: the time display

The Bottom Line: 
I would definitely buy this unit again. waterproof and rugged and now everything is working perfectly.

Author's Review
Okay I was influenced strongly by the special on the Magellan Meridian Gold being on sale at Sam's Club for $302 including an extra 64Mb memory, pc cable, and the Mapsend street software. Have so far used the unit on several long hikes in the Rocky Mtn Natl Park. Works quite well and its very easy to store waypoints, build routes, backtrack, etc. The base map shows the major features within the Park and the lakes that I hike to.

One irritating problem has surfaced and that is that the unit displays time that is exactly four minutes behind the correct time. I do mean exactly four minutes right down to the second. I have an atomic clock at home and this Meridian Gold is displaying the time four minutes behind the correct time. There is nothing that I can do to correct this and calls to Magellan and their support people are a total waste of effort. Their response has been something like: "well gee I have three wrist watches at home and they are all off." When I suggested that the owners manual states that the receiver will display the correct time from a satellites atomic clock they did not seem to understand the concept and said that the atomic clock on a satellite is not correct. I thought since the department of defense probably thinks the time is correct that maybe Magellan has a software or firmware problem. They are theoretically researching this annoying little problem. Other than the time glitch the unit is a joy to use and seems quite rugged.

UPDATE AS OF JULY 28, 2004:
MAGELLAN ENGINEERING HAD SOME INPUT INTO THIS ONE AND CALLED ME THIS MORNING AND WORKED ME THROUGH A FIX WHICH BASICALLY WIPED ALL MEMORY AFTER SAVING ROUTES TO A SEPARATE MEMORY CARD AND REMOVING IT. AFTER INITIALIZATION THE UNIT WORKED PERFECTLY AND THEN I LOADED THE TOPO MAPSEND PRODUCT AND EVERYTHING STILL WORKS. SEEMS LIKE THE PERFECT PRODUCT TO ME NOW.