Garmin RINO

 

I rarely see anything mentioned on here about the Garmin RINO line. The on-line reviews seem to be all over the board. Does anybody here have these and, if so, how well do they work for you?

huh?

Never heard of Garmin rino.

it's a GPS for walking & FRS/GMRS radio

allbizz wrote:

Never heard of Garmin rino.

http://sites.garmin.com/rino/

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. 2 Garmin DriveSmart 61 LMT-S, Nuvi 2689, 2 Nuvi 2460, Zumo 550, Zumo 450, Uniden R3 radar detector with GPS built in, includes RLC info. Uconnect 430N Garmin based, built into my Jeep. .

My 2 Cents

I bought a Rino 530 HCX back in 2008 for a trip to Yellowstone NP. There were 5 others in our group who also had them and we used the polling feature of the Rinos to keep tabs on each other. For that purpose, it worked very well. Back here at home, I had little success convincing any of my buddies to get one due to the $500+ price tag. You can get a quality handheld GPS and a good FRS radio for a lot less. After 4 years of only occasional use, I sold the unit on Ebay.

I have no experience with the new 600 series Rino’s but my impression of the older 530 HCX is it was ahead of its time. The unit was well built and rugged as the day is long but the 2.6” screen was a bit small and the case somewhat bulky. At almost 12 ounces with battery, I wasn’t comfortable carrying it in a shirt pocket. I mostly used the belt carabineer.

It took some trial and error with the option settings to get the Rino to work with other FRS radios but once “dialed in”, it beat the Motorola and Midland units I tested in range, clarity and battery life. At the time, it was one of the few radios on the market with a 2 watt transmit setting. I found it handy for conserving battery when .5 Watt wasn’t enough but 5 Watts was overkill.

As a handheld GPS, I found the 530 to be adequate. The only negatives were the small screen size, bulk and complex menu structure.

It depends on an individual’s needs as to whether a combo unit like the Rino is practical or not. These days, I prefer to carry my Oregon or Montana GPS along with my trusty old Motorola T6320 FRS radio.

Garmin Rino 655T Vs. Garmin Rino 650

I am thinking again about picking up a pair of Garmin RINOs. I am sort of on the fence between the Garmin Rino 655T and the Rino 650. It looks like they are pretty similar, except that the more expensive 655T has:

-Topographic Maps

-Digital Camera

Given the price difference, I am leaning towards the less expensive Rino 650 because I doubt that I would use either the digital camera or the topographic maps. However, my GPS experience has been with automotive GPS, thus I haven't used topographic maps. For anybody here that has used topographic maps on a GPS, how important are they?

https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/catalog/product/compareResul...

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You are probably better off getting the topo maps separately (if you desire them).

There are very good free maps available on GPS File Depot.

Or you get better maps than the preloaded maps (24k vs 100k) separately from Garmin.