michaelnel

It's still a tiny chunk of real estate. Just Lake Tahoe (at the border of California and Nevada) and a bit of land surrounding it is 900MB+ and I'd have to split that into 4 files to get it.

I just brought up basecamp with my Montana 600 connected and it says there is a FW version 2.60 available. Installing it now.

When you're all done add some olive oil and crushed garlic. That will keep vampires away from your GPS and attract Italian people.

Try to find a used Garmin GPSMap 60csx. I doubt there has ever been a more accurate handheld consumer-grade GPS, and they are very very tough and durable. The quad helix antenna and high sensitivity chipset make them work super under tree cover. They sell new for $219 at REI, so you should be able to get one in your stated price range if you buy used.

Rather than just whining about it here, I just now submitted a support request to address the problem. I'm sure they will tell me they're working on it, but if everyone who experiences the problem (ie: uses the service) would open a ticket, perhaps it would get a little more attention from Garmin.

In order to get pretty minimal and incomplete coverage around where I live I have 21 different birdseye downloads, and it took a lot more than 21 attempts to get those 21 files. If it really was "quick" and "unlimited" I would be able to just select what I want in the SF Bay Area and download it in one shot, and get what I asked for. It's Garmin software, and it's typically buggy and broken.

https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?pID=70144 Their advertising is really deceptive: "Use your BirdsEye Satellite Imagery subscription with BaseCamp™ software to quickly transfer an unlimited amount of satellite images to your Garmin device" Notice the words "quickly" and "unlimited". It's not quick, and it's very limited. The only thing that's accurate is the price.

I even suggested that perhaps they extend peoples' subscriptions according to how long the product has been effectively unusable, and they were unreceptive to that idea too. Instead they want us to "Rest assured that we are actively looking into this issue.". That was about a month ago from a Garmin developer.

The only way I have found to get the high resolution imagery (that is still lower resolution than maps.google.com provides for free) is to select small areas of no more than 50 - 70 MB. Then start the download. As soon as it starts, see how many tiles it intends to download. It should be downloading several thousand images. If it's downloading hundreds, you hit the bug and will get standard res fuzzball imagery. In one session I was able to do a 5000+ image 71MB download, but then selected another area which it said was going to be 21MB of high res and it downloaded 160 images of low res. Sometimes even if you do manage to get it to give you "high resolution" imagery (I hesitate to call it "high" resolution but that's what Garmin calls it), the download will be extremely slow, like they throttle the bandwidth. One day I downloaded a small segment (74 square km) totaling 4303 segments in Highest resolution. It took almost exactly an hour to download what turned out to be a 40.7MB file. My internet connection tests consistently at 17-19Mbps (very, very fast). That little smidgen of data should have downloaded in seconds. Some folks have asked for a refund on their birdseye subscription noting that it is almost too buggy to use, and Garmin has refused.

It was a cheap one. I think it was a "Low Class" Transcend card. No matter, I don't need it and I took it out. I am only using about 1/2 of the internal storage anyway.

Several ongoing threads about this on the Garmin board. Birdseye is badly broken, and Garmin knows about it.

We probably ought to powercycle the Montana between tests so there is no memory caching effect skewing the results. Make a change, reboot, then test. You want to control as many variables as you can.

Glad to hear you solved it. I wonder if getting some smaller but really fast uSD cards and splitting up the load amongst 'em might help, then you could install whatever ones you need when you need them.

My maps (I have each one in a different .img file, ie: ctnav.img, topo2008.img, catopo11.img and califtopo.img) are fairly small in area, because I don't get very far away from San Francisco. They cover from the Pacific coast to about Lake Tahoe (California / Nevada border) and maybe 200 miles north to south. If I don't need huge maps I don't see any reason to have them loaded all the time. If I go somewhere not currently covered, I will install what maps I need for the trip.

Dunno. Glad mine's fast! ;-)

Well so much for the slow uSD theory. Still took 4 seconds with all my maps enabled. But I don't have large maps installed.... all of the .img files I mentioned only total about 700 MB. Maybe it's the SIZE of the maps?

It would be interesting to me to see if moving the maps off of the SD onto the Montana would improve the performance. I will test the opposite scenario when it finishes moving the maps.

It's STILL copying the maps over...

In order to test the search speed I am moving about 700MB of .img files from the Montana to the uSD card in it, and it's VERY slow... it's estimating about 14 minutes to do the transfer. Looks like a good reason to not keep maps on a slow device, and if using a uSD card, it needs to be an expensive, fast one.

Still 4 seconds with CN, Topo 2008, California Topo (free), Calif Topo 2011 and Birdseye enabled. Although I do have an uSD card in it, there is nothing on it. Perhaps it is a speed issue on your uSD card?

I will try it with some other maps loaded. Do you have birdseye loaded too?

4 seconds for a list of All Categories under Food & Drink, and I am sitting at my desk indoors, although I have 5 bars reception.

I haven't tried it with the Montana yet, but I often just gave up on the 62S with CN 2012 ever finding any kind of restaurant. It would just go away and never come back. I never reported it, guess I should have. In contrast, my old CN 2010 in my Nuvi 1690 is VERY responsive for stuff like that.

I just got an email from Garmin, they want my system.xml file to work on the shutdown issue. They also said: "PS: If you send email to MontanaBeta@garmin.com we get it a little quicker"

Thanks for that, but that's not really a Montana wiki. That's the Oregon / Colorado wiki who has grudgingly given permission to have a Montana-specific discussion area. I would love to have a Montana wiki that is very similar to the Oregon / Colorado one, with all the buglists, and versions info, and all the tips and tricks that are on that one. I have never set up a wiki, and I suspect that getting it populated with all that info would take a large community effort. I bet the Oregon / Colorado one has been around since the Colorado was the hot new product and has developed over the years into what it is today. But to paraphrase the old proverb: "The best time to start a Montana Wiki is six months ago, the second best time is now.".