I recently purchased a Magellan FX324 from the US as it has now been discontinued in AUS and I have wanted one for a while so thought I'd better get in quick. I purchased it from www.westmarine.com for US$349 plus US$50.80 postage via traceable FedEx. This was the best price I could find hence the reason I jumped on board quickly. The whole transaction took exactly 1 week but the unit was delivered in 3 days once it was picked and packed. This ultimately converted (using the exchange rate at the time) to AU$520 in my hands. Potentially I could have been charged a further AU$125 customs/duty/tax but I was lucky to have avoided this charge.
It turns out I may have just got in in time as it is no longer advertised on their website. West Marine are still selling these on eBay at similar or less prices so have a bid. eBay Link
2 problems I faced initially (one my fault and one I knew about) were, as it was a US purchase it only came with a North American Basemap, the second being it would not maintain a satellite fix. This issue turned out (after assitance from Magellan support) to be, the first time you turn the unit on, you need to leave it on with satellite fix for atleast 20min as it needs to dowload some (unknown?) data from the satellites which allows the unit to maintain a good fix. Mine continually dropped and tried to re-initialise satellite fixes every 20-30sec until I performed a fix that they sent me. After that, all was sweet and unit tracks smooth and true. If anyone is having this same issue, let me know and I will post up the process.
I have also been able to fix the local basemap issue with the help of eMule and the Magellan_Meridian yahoo group. It turns out that most of the functions for doing special things in the Meridians also work with the FX324 with a few differences that Magellan Support inadvertently helped me work out. Bascially you need to "obtain" a copy of the AUS Meridian basemap from the internet (*cough* eMule *cough*) and using an SD card, USB card reader/writer for your computer and the secret menus in the GPS, you can replace the inbuilt basemap. I've tested this and it was surprising how easy and quick it was! I won't bore people with the details here but if anyone wants the step-by-step I will post it up later.
As a foot note, I have also been able to obtain add-in maps called DiscoverAUS to add to this unit. Basically the basemap is used until you get to a certain level of zoom and then DiscoverAUS takes over. This covers surprisingly detailed 4WD tracks all over AUS. The FX324 can only handle 1 detailed map at a time and you can only load a maximum of 64Mb of maps to the unit at once so I advise you need SD cards no larger than 64Mb but you'll need 4 to cover all of Australia at once. Larger cards will work (at the moment I'm using a 512Mb card) but you cannot change maps while in the unit so there is not need for larger cards. I've just been reloading different maps to the same card for testing, not hard to swap between maps using a computer but you may not want to carry one around with you.
I guess in conclusion, I have basically obtained a normally expensive and fully featured mapping GPS, now containing local content, for a bargain price. As I say, if you want one of these bad boys, order quick as they seem to be running out fast. Don't be scared to order from overseas as you can convert the unit to function EXACTLY as if you bought it here within a matter of only hours.
That's about it for now, questions welcomed.
and make them work on the unit. my dad has one of those sd card reader/writers that plugs into the USB port on the computer so i will use that.
) the australian basemap also.
