GREAT GADGETS

Avoid 'Blair Witch' dilemma with eTrex

By Eric Griffith

If you've ever been lost in the woods, you know just how scary it can be ... and that "Blair Witch" movie certainly didn't help. Thanks to satellites, you never need be lost again—as long as you've taken along a global positioning system (GPS) device to send you in the right direction.

Garmin's $145 eTrex ( www.garmin.com ; 800-800-1020 ) is just what you need to find your way home. This waterproof handheld device weighs only 5.3 ounces and comes with a lanyard so you can wear it around your neck. It runs for 22 hours on two AA batteries. The small, backlit screen is where you keep track of your latitude and longitude.

eTrex can point you in the right direction.

Let eTrex pinpoint your location and then you can start walking, running or sailing wherever you want. The buttons on the sides let you enter up to 500 "waypoints" that specify where you make a course change; you can then reverse the onscreen map and venture back from whence you came.

eTrex will let you know how far you've come and how far you have to go. You can choose to view your entire journey or just a portion of it by changing the map scale; it adjusts from 500 feet to 800 miles.

While clever and useful, eTrex requires some careful study of the manual and a good deal of patience when it comes to position triangulation—it took about five minutes for the system to find me while I stood in the middle of a frozen lake. Garmin says you can use eTrex in a car, but I couldn't get it to work in that situation. Still, serious hikers—and those not entirely comfortable in the woods—should seriously consider it.