michaelnel

Well, this thing is just too sexy to resist. I ordered a 600 from Amazon (don't want or need the camera or the 100K topo maps) today, and it will be here tomorrow. If I like it, the 62S goes back to REI.

My Oregon 450 did that, and so does my GPSMap 62S. I can get completely off the calculated route and it will stubbornly keep it in place. With the Nuvi 1690 in my car, the instant I get off the route it recalculates a new one. I wish the handhelds would do that. For instance, as you probably know, San Francisco is very hilly. However, often you can take a slightly longer route that has a lower gradient (maybe a block or so), or miss a big hill altogether. The Garmin handhelds will calculate the most direct route even if it goes right over the top of a hill. I might elect to take a flatter route, but it ignores what I am doing and keeps the old route in place. I have to press "FIND -> Recalculate Off Road - FIND - Recalculate On Road For Distance" to make it calculate a new route according to where I am now, and often as not it will want to route me back to the old unsuitable route. I have almost given up on using City Navigator for pedestrian routing it's so wacko, and often as not just do direct routing and figure out the best way to get there as I walk along. I think next time I buy a Garmin handheld I will just skip CN and use the free and excellent California Topo instead.

Having a Montana on a RAM mount with that belt clip would have your pants around your knees like some kinda hiphop creep.

My iPod Touch with the geocaching app displays the images inline in cache pages too. Really, Garmin is way behind on this. A unit that costs as much as the Montanas ought to be able to do it.

Yes, it does, if you use GSAK to grab the images and download them as part of the export to the gps. That's what I was hoping the Montana could do, but it sounds like it is just as limited as an Oregon in that respect.

Thanks, that's what I wanted to know. The Montana wouldn't help me with that aspect of paperless caching.

What's it called?

Yes, I know the gpx files only contain links to the pictures. I use GSAK, and I just looked at the gps config for the Magellan explorist 710. It has options in the "download waypoints" dialog to grab the images from the internet and to send them to the gps during the transfer waypoint, and that's what I used to do. The net result was that I had them to refer to out in the field, however it is accomplished. Looking at GSAK's dialog for the Montanas, it does not offer those image choices noted above.

One of the features I did like about the Magellan explorist 710 I owned briefly was that it would actually bring over photos and graphics when PQs were loaded from GC. For instance, one of my favorite caches ("Chinatown Tour", http://coord.info/GC17MZF) has watercolor paintings as critical parts of finding your way through the cache. It would be virtually impossible to solve this one without those watercolors. My Garmin Oregon would only bring over the text in the PQ. The 62S is the same way. That kind of makes doing "spur of the moment" caching more difficult, because if I am out caching and have it find the next nearest cache and it turns out to be one like "Chinatown Tour", I couldn't do it. I would have to go home and print out the pictures first. Does the Montana's paperless caching bring over the pictures and graphics too, or just the text?

She includes her watercolors in most of her caches too. She's a very gifted woman, and I am so glad she does this in my area!

For me, it's a cache like "Chinatown Tour" ( http://coord.info/GC17MZF ) by GeoWomyn_SF_CA. She obviously put SO much work and love into it that it is by far my most favorite of the caches I have found.

Me either. If their latest greatest most expensive best unit was as bad as that, I don't want anything further to do with them. I have checked (without posting) on www.exploristforum.com and although they have come out with a new firmware release that fixed some of the problems, the remaining ones would still drive me crazy.

I post a DNF log each time I visit a cache and make a serious effort to find it and fail. Then when I do manage to find it I post a FOUND log, but I don't delete the DNF logs.

It finally finished, and brought the app up. Seems to work fine now.

So is mine. :-(

Camera: Picture quality of the 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera is remarkably good (up to 1600x1200 pixels), the low resolution video camera not so much (video resolution is only 320x240 pixels and playback is rough and jerky) . Photographs are automatically geotagged and can be attached to your notes for the geocache. The photographs and videos can also be viewed on the internal picture viewer. Microphone: There is a microphone and speaker for voice annotation so you can record spoken notes in the field. These notes can also be attached to a geocache. Feel: Feels good in my hand, solid and substantial. The large loop at the bottom is perfect for attaching a lanyard (although no lanyard is supplied). Construction: The 710 seems very well-built mechanically, with O-rings to seal it against water intrusion. It is waterproof to IPX-7 specifications. The speaker, microphone and camera lens are all outside the sealed area, but I assume they are waterproofed some way. Receiver: The SiRFstarIII based receiver locks in solidly and holds lock even indoors and in heavy tree cover and "concrete canyons" in the city. The accuracy and position jump around some when you don't have a clear view of the sky, but it seldom loses lock. Memory: 8GB of memory is included, and there is a card slot for microSD cards up to 36GB. 8GB is a LOT of standard memory for a GPS! Maps: Turn-by-turn navigation works very well, and the excellent Summit series USA topographical and City series USA turn-by-turn navigation maps with voice guidance are included in addition to the World Edition basemap. Batteries: Comes with a pair of expensive, long lasting Eveready Ultimate Lithium batteries. Other brands usually don't come with any batteries at all. There is also a coupon included that gets you $2.00 off on a set of Eveready Ultimate Lithiums. Altimeter: After calibration to my home elevation, the barometric altimeter seems to stay calibrated well. Customizable hard buttons: You can assign frequently used functions to the two buttons on the side of the unit for easy access. Display: The high resolution display excellent indoors or in shade when backlight is on, but it's another story in bright or hazy sunlight. See below. Batteries: has settings for Lithium, Alkaline, and Rechargeable batteries "Four CornerTM" menu: works well and is easy to get used to. Tapping the center of the screen once brings up the Four Corner menu. The upper left corner defaults to a "Dashboard" screen that has a compass display and 8 data fields. Each of the data fields can be customized to show the data you want to see on that screen. You can also choose a conventional compass display, a "Road" display that gives a psuedo-3d display of the road ahead like a car GPS, a rotating strip-style compass, a satellite display, a barometer display, an altimeter display, a display filled with data fields only, and a profile display. Tapping the upper right corner brings up the "One Touch" menu (see below). The lower left corner gets you the main menu, and from the main menu you can choose any of the top level functions or go into a Settings sub-menu to tweak the 710 to just how you like it. The lower right corner always gets you a context-sensitive scrolling menu that changes according to what function you are using at the moment. "Dashboard" screen: is useful and easily customizable (see above). "One TouchTM" Menu: This is a nice idea, but won't allow me to do some things I would like to have on "one touch" basis (for instance "Cancel Route"). Paperless geocaching: Excellent ... contains all the info you might need including pictures that appear in the cache description on geocaching.com. It does NOT include the gallery pictures though. This unit comes with a certificate good for a 30 day Premium membership at geocaching.com. Support: The guys in the "Magellan Insider" group are super-helpful unpaid volunteers. The Magellan Product Manager for this product is very helpful and takes a personal interest in customer problems. Cons: Display: High resolution displays don't work well in bright sunlight and this one is just as bad or worse than the Garmin Colorado and Oregon displays. If you hold it at just the right angle to the sun you can read it easily, but at most angles it is so dark as to be unreadable. This makes it particularly bad for use in a fixed mount on a bicycle, where you will almost never be able to read it. It also has a strange interaction with polarized sunglasses that causes the whole display to appear in shades of gold. Anything white on the screen (including the white on black text during boot) shows as gold through polarized sunglasses. This makes it even more difficult to read than the Garmin hi-res screens which do not have this strange interaction with polarized sunglasses. The backlight helps, and it comes on when you tap the screen, but the backlight is also a major consumer of electrical power and the more it is on, the shorter battery life is. Touch screen: Sometimes it is somewhat unresponsive, and scrolling through long menus (there are many) can be difficult to do without inadvertently selecting something. Later versions of the firmware have addressed this to some extent by adding up/down arrows at the bottom, but not all long menus have them yet. There are no slick features like multitouch as found on Apple touch screens. System boot: It takes quite a while to boot up (about 1 minute) and acquire satellite lock. However, once it gets a lock, it seems to hold it well. Unfortunately, periodically the unit will announce it is "restarting to improve performance", and you get to watch it go through the reboot procedure again, and afterward it doesn't seem to have improved performance at all. It did that on mine five times in one morning geocaching session. Route calculation: At least on my unit running the latest firmware (4.83 at the time of this writing), calculating routes can take ridiculous amounts of time. One day I was 1.5 blocks and one right angle turn away from a geocache when it decided it needed to recalculate the route. It took three minutes to recalculate the route. This was in an open area, clear view of the sky in all directions, all bars lit up on the satellite display and the dashboard indicating "excellent" for signal strength. It often takes a really long time to calculate routes, sometimes I have had to power-cycle it and when it comes back up it finishes calculating the route immediately. These delays in route calculation happen annoyingly often. Keyboard: This is an incredibly poorly-designed implementation of a touch screen keyboard. They have split it into two screens for the alphabet and you have to keep going back and forth. Even if the word you are spelling is all on the second page, there is no spacebar on the second page so you have to go back to the first page to get a space, or to capitalize a letter. It is by far the worst keyboard I have ever seen on a handheld device. Hopefully they can fix this in the firmware. Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch have the keyboard Magellan ought to be emulating. Battery consumption: This thing loves to chew its way through AA cells. They advertise 16 hours, but I can only see it doing this if the unit is turned off. 2700mAh Powerex NiMH cells are good for maybe 3-4 hours. Non-rechargeable (and expensive) Lithiums maybe 8. You can extend battery life by setting it to time out and go into a mode where GPS tracking continues but the display goes off, and you awaken it with a tap of the power button. This helps a lot, but every time it comes awake from this mode the compass needs to be recalibrated, which is pretty annoying. Compass: The compass needs to be recalibrated frequently. According to the manual, to do it, you dig down into the setup menu and choose "calibrate compass", and it displays a diagram of a figure 8 pattern they want you to move the unit through while rotating your wrist so the unit is upside up part of the way and upside down part of the way. I do that, waving it around like an idiot for five or ten seconds and then it tells me "calibration failed, please try again". Sometimes I go through four or five iterations of this before it says "calibration successful", only to have it go out of calibration again in a few minutes. I have learned through the eXplorist user forum that you don't actually have to go to the calibration screen to do this, you can just look at the little red compass calibration indicator at the top of each screen and wave it around if it is red (it turns gold when it is in calibration), but you still have to do this very, very frequently. On the numerous Garmin units I have had, one calibration of the compass lasts until you either power it off and back on or change the batteries. This is surely a bug that needs to be fixed. Menu system: Although the "four corners" menu system is a nice start, too many commonly used functions are buried too many clicks deep and on long scrolling lists that have no easy way to navigate them. For instance, if you are geocaching and decide to cancel your hunt for the current one, you have to tap the center of the screen to bring up the four corner menu, then tap the lower right to bring up the context menu, then scroll down carefully several screens while being careful not to accidentally select something (if you do, you'll have to start the process all over again) before you get to the "cancel route" choice, and then you have to confirm with one more press that is what you really want to do. I was hoping to be able to put this common choice on the "One Touch" menu that is accessed from the four corners menu, but that is not possible to do. Further, it appears that if you do use the "Cancel Route" button it will remove all of the field notes in the "logs.txt" file, so when you get home and connect to geocaching.com to upload your field notes, the file is gone. Another bug. The "One Touch" menu is again a nice start, but poorly implemented. It gives you twelve programmable buttons (the first three are set to be "Home", "Camp" and "Car", but they are only programmable to a particular destination, or a top-level function (for instance, canceling a route is not one of the available choices, but "Camera" is), or a customizable search. I think they ought to let you program any of those buttons to reach anything you can get to through the convoluted menu system, but you can't currently do that. "Track Up" Navigation Mode: This really works poorly at low speeds or when you stop. The map and compass display will just randomly rotate and it is extremely disorienting to look at. I found this mode to be unusable unless I am moving along at a good clip. If you are geocaching and close to a cache, you are usually walking around slowly and looking at the display to get you close, and when it is randomly rotating it is useless. "Paperless Geocaching" Mode: My unit, when approaching a geocache, will often get into a mode where the "Smart Arrow" still works in terms of showing you the direction to the waypoint, but the map will not update and the distance shown to the waypoint will not update or change even when walking hundreds of feet. It doesn't matter if the compass is calibrated or not, it just won't update the distance for long periods of time / distance, and then suddenly it WILL update it when you are a hundred feet on the far side of the waypoint. Obviously this bug makes it useless for geocaching, and for finding waypoints in general. "Vantage Point" Software: This is a nice looking free software package to allow you to view stuff from your GPS and transfer stuff back and forth. It seems to have some serious bugs though in working with the 710. For instance, if you have it synchronize with the 710 or send waypoints and geocaches to the 710, it manages to corrupt the contents of the 710, and you end up with all waypoints and geocaches being listed on the 710 simply as "Error!" and they are all positioned somewhere off the west coast of Africa. There is a workaround involving deleting a file on the 710 and then rebooting it to let the 710 recreate it, but a user really shouldn't have to do stuff like that to use the product. Summary: The Magellan eXplorist 710 has lots of great features, but it has so many that are ½ way done and so many bugs that it seems to me it should have stayed in development and testing for another year at Magellan before being released on an unsuspecting public. At the MSRP of this unit ($550), consumers have a right to expect a more thoroughly debugged product than this. After a very very frustrating week of 710 ownership, I sent mine back to Amazon for a refund. NOTE: I was able to determine through experimentation that if you hook the 710 to your computer in USB Mass Storage mode and delete all of the files in the USR directory, they will be regenerated during startup and many of the bugs noted here will go away. The tracking no longer "stalls" when approaching a waypoint or geocache, the "track up" spinning doesn't happen, etc.. Unfortunately, the corruption starts immediately and builds to the point where the unit becomes unusable again, and the only way to fix it is to delete those files again. That presupposes that you have brought along a laptop or some other way to delete the files though, because you cannot do it from the GPS interface.

Beware of the high end explorists. See my review of the 710 in this forum.

You could grab the big PQ, load the whole thing into GSAK and then use GSAK to draw a polygon filter to include the stuff you are interested in, then transfer that filtered stuff to your GPS. That's what I do.

I want to find a group of bacon lovers to cache with. They should love bacon, but not to the extent there isn't plenty left for me. This is very important in my geocaching endeavors.

I have read of instances where the Oregon series has had problems with the USB port breaking or having poor connections inside the unit. Might that be the issue with yours?

This should be interesting. Nobody has ever talked about the Oregon 450 and what they like or dislike about it here. Let me get my bag of popcorn.

Thanks, Myotis. I should have explained it that way.

It probably would have been a good idea, prior to posting in it.

I am talking ALL gps units, including Garmin Oregons. I am certain that the vast majority of the GPS units in use around the world (except specialized ones like Geomates and explorist GCs) are used for non-geocaching purposes.

When I had an Oregon 450 it operated on the USB cable just fine without batteries, and when batteries were in it and it was plugged in to USB it did not charge them, but it didn't discharge them either. My 62S behaves the same. I only used both units in mass storage mode, never in spanner mode (except once on the 450 to try it). I prefer to just plug them in and go into mass storage mode automatically.