Suunto X9i

You can get several weeks of battery life on the trail (or in travel mode) if you don’t use the GPS very much.

It is a spendy gadget. I ordered mine primarily for track skiing (where it works great). The first model I got had a bad battery and customer support at Suunto USA was very confused for a couple of days until everyone figured out that I had a bad battery in my watch and had me send it in for battery replacement.

If you are just using the GPS to satisfy curiosity it is a fine gadget. If you actually want to use a GPS for real navigation a Geko or Etrex is probably a better choice, just on straight-up ease of use.

Thanks for the feedback David, I can see where it would be good for defining tracks. Did you have any issues with the cover overhead affecting your signal strength?

I primarily use my GPS for periodically verifying bearings, transpose those coordinates to my map and continue on from there. I also use it to mark waypoints that I can later upload to my TOPO map, or use the ‘Go To’ feature.