dont laugh. I used a garmin 2 plus and found it gave me exactly what I needed for my cross country navs.
no map database so nothing to go out of date.
however it used to track about a dozen satellites all the time.
I noticed recently that it was only ever tracking about six satellites.
I looked around at the offerings and the cost of the map databases that I don't use were all too high.
eventually I purchased a garmin etrex10 for about $99 new.
this wasn't what I wanted but the screens could be reconfigured.
I now have almost the same functionality as my old garmin 2 plus in the screen I use.
what I also got in the upgrade was 2 aa battery operation, configs stored internally on a micro SD card and thus no system battery flat so all wiped as before.
but more importantly I got the tracking of a full constellation of satellites back.
in these old out of date gps units how many satellites are being tracked?