Originally Posted by thebulls

eTrex Vista HCx is my top choice for a randonneuring GPS. I've used a Cx and HCx since 2006. I tried "upgrading" to an eTrex 30, but it has a fatal flaw: If you go off route, it doesn't bother to tell you, it just recalculates what it thinks is your best route to the destination, even if that takes you off the official rando route. And once it's recalculated, you can have a very hard time finding your way back to the official route if you don't even know when you went off it. On the HCx, you can set it to tell you if you go off route, but the morons at Garmin took that out of the 30. So ... boat anchor.

Supposedly, the Edge still has the setting to prevent auto-recalculation. So that means it is still a candidate to be a randonneuring GPS. But for me, the simplicity of the HCx with its replaceable batteries, plus its lower cost, dominates the choice. I know that the Edge can be powered indefinitely with an external battery pack or dyno hub, but that requires running a cable to the GPS's USB port, which introduces a failure vector in wet weather. It's more than theoretical since I've seen several reports of Edge computers that have either failed in wet weather rides, or that have eventually had the USB port corrode to the point that the Edge computer will no longer communicate with a PC and therefore requires replacement.