Want To Buy: Garmin GPSMap 176C Datacard for Bahamas

[sv Winterlude]

Please let me know if it's incorrect to post here....

Help! When I tried to get the Bahamas datacard for our trusty Garmin GPSMap 176C, I was informed that Garmin has discontinued our electronic charting system.

Now supposedly we have to buy an entirely new chartplotter or whatever to get the Bahamas charts? NOT! I'm not buying a new laptop (that was also a suggestion I'm on a MacBook Pro with Nobeltec 8.1 on bootcamp/Windows XP). Everything worked well enough to get us from SW Florida all the way to Cartagena and back over six years.

Now we want to go to the Bahamas and can't buy Garmin Bluecharts to fit our GPS? Unacceptable. We can always go back to the "old" way and use the Explorer Chartbooks which we just bought and a handheld GPS with waypoints we use from the Explorer Charts.

But we've gotten accustomed to this little Garmin GPSMap 176C and know how it works.

I know it was a popular GPS in it's time, sold lots. So is there any chance anyone has the Bahamas (especially the Exumas) DataCard for a Garmin GPSMap 176C that they might want to sell?

Anybody??? Let us know please. THANKS!

Cheers -- Jan

[Ziggy]

Jan,
I sorry I can't help you with the Bahamas charts. I was just about to write a nasty note about Garmin's practice of discontinuing sale of their proprietary chart formats for their older products, but...

You can now buy a Garmin GPSMAP 441s from West Marine for $439.99. This includes all US Coastal waters and Bahamas. Is also includes a larger screen than the 176c, a fishfinder function (transducer extra), NMEA 2000 and NMEA 0183, and the ability to display AIS and DSC targets. If Garmin were still selling the Bahams chip, my guess is it would cost somewhere around $140. So for $300 more you get a pretty nice chartplotter, you still get to keep your 176c as a backup, and you get updated charts for the entire U.S. coast. That actually doesn't seem like an altogether bad deal to me.

[four winds]

Bought my 441s from thegpsstore.com bundled with the transducer for a better price than others without the transducer.


I am pleased with the 441s for its size and price.

[roverhi]

You should be able to find the blank cards and a card writer on Ebay or some of the retailers. You can then download the charts off a CD and write them to the blank card. Not cheap but will keep the 176C going.

The other choice is to haunt Craigs List, Ebay and various cruising websites. You should be able to find used Garmin proprietary chart chips for almost anywhere with some patience.

If you need the Gulf from Brownsville to Tampa, I've got the two chips.