I'm a Garmin customer going back 10 years, and my preferred series is the GPSMap 60, as it evolves, because of the outstanding sensitivty and location performance, ruggedness, and functional flexibility. You can make it what you want it to be, buying the appropriate maps.
But thats probably a whole lot more than you want to pay. ETrex 20 will do what you want. It comes with a global basemap, not much detail on that, but you can buy 1:24K topo maps regionall or locally, or 1:100K maps for the whole U.S. ($117 list) and there are sources for free maps.
Alternative I wpuld consider, am considering, is Earthmate PN series from DeLorme, which sells for $300 with DeLorme's 1:100k equivalent TopoUSA, which I find really useful on the PC as well. For more detail locally, DeLorme has larger scale map and image products, including GPS registered satellite inagery.
If you want large scale maps, generally you can expect to pay as much or more for maps as you do for the basic mapping GPS receiver. When you look through the product lines for each manufacturer in the mapping GPS business, compare model to model, you might see that the larger price jumps have to do with which maps are included in the price. The electronics, displays, packaging are all pretty cheap to produce. The big cost is producing maps, and keeping them up to date. Updating is not as much an issue with topo as with road maps and higway and urban points of interest, but there are still changes to be incorporated over time.
PS: I see the 100K US Topo from Garmin is discontinued, they are selling those maps in pieces for $60. 1:24K maps are sold in smaller pieces for $100, larger pieces for somewhat more, and products at that scale are different for hiking and general use versus products for hunting GPS.
Tom Test
Itasca Spirit 29B
