Portable Amateur Radio - Yaesu VX-8GR or DR?

[Tracer13]

I'm looking into getting a portable ham for primary use in the bush with APRS support (so I can transmit location to a digi-peater for wife/family to see at least once a night). Now because I am in BC, we have lots of water around, and I'm wondering if for my uses the 8GR is sufficient or if I should really pay the extra for the 8DR. I really would like the integrated GPS, but I think I could manually enter my gps coordinates by triangulating off a map and entering it in through the 8DR (vs buying the adapter).

Can anyone confirm first of all if this is correct or if you would definitely need to buy the adapter to send out coordinates to an APRS digipeater?

Secondly Will missing the 6m and 220mhz bands what would i be missing out on?

Any other features that are exclusive to the 8DR that you use often I'd be interested to hear also, as I am new to amateur radio, but want to buy once and be happy rather than buy once and be looking to upgrade soon.

 

[kayn1n32008]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9780; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.600 Mobile Safari/534.8+)

Based on having lived in BC, you will not be missing anything not having 6m and 1.25m, unless your in the Fraser Valley you will never see a 220MHz repeater. Get the water proof one and get the GPS reciever. Be warned tho, you might need to get up high to get into a digi. Where are you going to be traveling in BC?

 

[Tracer13]

Ill be traveling mostly along the coast, with some trips through the interior during the fall. I'm really looking for a go-to. Would IPX 5 of the GR be sufficient for heavy rains or if the radio (hopefully not) fell in a puddle and was quickly pulled out or would IPX56 of the DR be needed?