As a recent recepient of a Garman GPS, and being technologically challenged, I have a question. Will a GPS purchased in the states work in Canada, the British Isles or Europe? Do I need to purchase additional downloads for each country? It would be a most helpful devise if it could be used in other countries.

Thanks in advance

epends on what features you want to use.

The GPS will function, You can leave bread crumb trails, set marks, track mileage and speed etc regardless of where you are.My GPS is 10-12 years old and has no maps internally.  It searches the sky and finds at least 3 satellites, and from that it will give me elevation, Long & Lat position,  my current & avg speed, Sunrise, My total elevation increase, total miles traveld, I can set waypoints etc.  And I can see no reason why those features wouldn't work anywhere in the world as long as it can find satellites in the sky.  I've used it in alaska, the US and Mexico with no problem.

If you are looking for directions to streets, actually seeing maps on the screen. That will be dependant on the GPS make and model and how much memory and what software the mfg downloaded. But the basics will work regardless.

I own a Garmin GPS. I live in Canada and bought it here, then traveled to the U.S. with it. It is simple to move from Canada to the U.S. with the Garmin - when you are setting you address there is a place where it asks "country". You simply make Canada or the U.S. then it asks you for what state or provience you require. So I'm quite sure you won't have any issues to current maps in Canada. Also, there is a place where you can change the features so you can see your speed in kilometers per hour instead of miles, distance in kilometers, etc. That won't automatically change once you go into Canada, that will be up to you to change in the settings.

I cannot say whether it will have the European maps installed, I'm guessing not. But perhaps you can download them via the internet. Even without the maps you will have features such as speed, altitude, etc, but that really isn't the reason people have GPSs in most cases.

Your Garmin should have preloaded maps of the US and Canada.  To check, just pick a city in canada and see if it will load your directions.  As far as coutries other than canada, you will need to visit Garmins website and check to see if they have maps for that area.