Catsware

Sounds great Garmin, I am looking forward for the next features for the Colorado! But what concerns me most is the first sentence... SW resources usually never become available...

Sorry, I was not accurate in my last post. When I was talking about 2.60, I was talking about the Colorado FW 2.60, not the GPS SW 2.60, which was on my device from the very beginning.

On the weekend I did a really long geocaching hike, which took more than 13 hours. During the day I watched the behaviour of the Colorado very carefully. I started with pretty empty eneloops, in the forest and it was raining. After half an hour I realized the track was drifting away from the path on the map. Then suddenly another jump about 100 meters. I turned the CO off and on again. The track was back on the path immediately and stayed there for the next 15 min. Then the drift started again and I decided to replace the eneloops by fresh ones. For the rest of the day I never saw the drift again and nearly all the trackpoints of the 44km round are right on the map! During the day I had to replace the eneloops again, but by that time I was on the open field, the clouds where gone and the sun was shining. So no drift, even with low battery. Now I have a new theory, why I might not have seen the drift issue before 2.60. The must have changed something on the battery power level or so. Together with bad reception this is causing the drift. I remember my boyfriend always had issues with his GPSMAP72CS, when the batteries where low, too. So today I looked up the changelog for the release and found: "Improved behavior in low battery state" Looks like it has not improved for my device.

1) might be the same drift issue others are reporting, complicated a bit by routing with lock on road. If it really is the same issue, presumably "lock on road" was responsible for correcting the issue without having to power-cycle the unit. Or it might not be the same issue at all. 2) Not sure this is the same issue. This one really sounds like plain old high-sensitivity "wandering", although the distances are a little bit large. Also, unless Garmin actually FIXED something in 2.6, the drift issue never clears itself up without power-cycling the unit. 3) Not sure I understand this one. Failure of the return track to match the outbound track would be characteristic of the issue others see. Not sure what you mean by the reference to "another trail, which seemed to be not on the map", though. And 100m is rather short by comparison with the distances others report. But anything is possible. If this is the same problem others see, no one else has reported it as correcting itself without a power cycle. If this IS the same issue, it has been there for a long time prior to the 2.6 unit firmware. There is some evidence that it was introduced with the 2.60 chipset firmware, which has been around for quite a while. Although it appears that some people see the issue repeatedly (frequently in the same location), it is rare on the average. So it's possible you've had the problem all along and simply never tickled it before. Thanks for your thoughts, here is a little bit more... 1. I always have "lock on roads" turned off, since I only have a non-routable topo map. So it wasn't this feature, that was "healing" the signal. 2. I will try to power cycle next time if I will see an effect like this again. 3. I have a screenshot for this one, but I don't know how to post it here without having webspace... The 100m of back and force are absolutely on the same track and also on the path painted on the map. Then we turned to the right leaving this path, onto a path that was surprisingly not on my map. During our little break, the triangle suddenly jumped onto a path painted on the map. The shape of the track looked exaktely like the path painted on the map, but it was shifted about 50m to the west from the time we turned around. You will understand, when you see the picture. It is not map accuracy, because the rest of the tracking was right on! I might be wrong but I still have the feeling that the drift was not there forever. Could it be that the hardware is getting older and is running out of some internal calibrations and tweaks? Some bathtub curve effect maybe? Just a thought...

I have have seen 3 (different?) drift issues in the last couple of weeks. I believe it started with the FW upgrade to 2.60: 1. Driving the car on a winding road: suddenly the track drifts slowly away from the road and then jumps back exactely to the road. This happened two times now. 2. Searching a cache approx. 30 m off for abot 20 min. GPS is changing position all the time, jumping back and force about 10-15 m each jump. Then a big jump to the cache location and the GPS sticks to this location within 2-3m. Even after I walked away a bit and came back, it was absolutely on! 3. We were walking about 100m in one direction, turned around and walked back the exact same way. Then we took another trail, which seemed to be not on the map. After a while we took a rest the suddenly we were back on the map track again... pretty confusing! I have my Colorado since March and I use it a lot in the car, with my bike and for hiking/geocaching, and I belive this issue has not been there from the beginning.

I found another issue: my upgrade didn't work immediately! First power on after upgrade I was reading "Validation Update xx% Vollständig". After counting to 99 the normal screen came up very fast, but I still had SW 2.51 installed! I shut down and powered on again, same thing : Validating... I had to repeat the upgrade process and after "Validating..." I got "SOFTWARE LOADING". Now I have 2.54 also. One good thing for users of the old TOPO Germany: The trails in the forests are now grey-white which is much more visible than the brown-green ones... at least something good happend ;-)

I agree, doing multis is what I like most and Garmins current "implementation" is pretty annoying!

I see the same issue with Topo Germany V1. But it is not a new one, I have seen it before with 2.4.

Long Geocache Listings are now shown completely. Some were cut before!