dstedman

Wow - no micro-USB. Fail. I'm tired of carrying around a mini USB cable for my Oregon 600. And requiring a phone to see the doppler? Double fail. MyRadar does it on my iPhone better than they ever could. What are they doing?

Thanks for checking it out for me, madturk! I did notice this morning that they look fine when the 650 is in daylight instead of night mode, so it must be something weird with the maps & the inverted night mode. Fortunately I don't do much navigating in the BWCA at night.

I just got my 650 and the maps I was hoping would work look like crap - all grey with the lakes not showing up right in the BWCA of northern MN. Any chance someone could try these maps and see if they don't look all grey and blocky with no lakes defined at all? You'd be a life saver if you could tell me how to get them to look right... http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/maps/view/153/ thanks! dan

650's in stock at GPS City it looks like. I'm still going to wait for one from REI...

REI just added a way to pre-order for the 650 - you'll have to get in line behind me, though! http://www.rei.com/product/855743/garmin-oregon-650-gps

I did figure out something interesting. It only connects the dots when the GPS turns itself off after losing power from my car. Meaning that if I manually turn it off when I turn off the car instead of letting it time down the 30 seconds after power disconnect, I don't get the dots connected. So this is a pretty easy thing to do to keep it from happening... dan

Yeah - it is silly. I'd like to not have to go through a bunch of menu items to tell it to do something that every Garmin GPS that I have ever owned before it has never done. I like seeing the tracks of places I have been, and I use my Vista HCX mostly in the car. Really strange that a programmer would have decided that it would be a good idea to link every coordinate together. Understandable if the GPS loses satellite signal for a few minutes, but when I turn it off I am telling it "I'm not interested in anything that happens between now and when I turn it on again!". :-)

Naw - this is the line you get between two points after turning off the gps for a while, then turning it back on at a different location. It's a straight line & it's Garmin's way of playing connect the dots. Does it in the car when plugged in as well. Thanks, though.

I'm tired of my maps looking like I've flown over the entire area in an airplane. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about - you turn off your GPS, turn it back on after moving somewhere else, and boom - you have a straight line between where you turned it off and your new location. Why has Garmin decided to invent data for you? Seems like there should be a setting so that it doesn't "connect the dots" everytime you turn the GPS off and on. Anyone know of a fix? I won't even comment on the whole drift/firmware issue. I will say that while this is the most feature-laden handheld GPS I've owned, it's also had the most problems for me. The latest firmware seems to have helped a bit, but in addition to the drift & mileage variations I get tired of things like the fact that if you are going less than 1.5 MPH (say, in a canoe while trolling) it wants to alternate between 1.5 and 0 MPH constantly. I know I'm not changing speed. Seriously...

Did you try a hard reset?

Actually, push in the upper right button (page), joystick (push in while perfectly centered - this is the problem button as it gets decentered when you push on the on button), and while holding these two in, press the on button. There's no timing sequence other than trying to keep the first two pushed in while pushing the on button for the normal second or two to turn the unit on. Takes me about ten tries to get it right. You'll know you've accomplished it because you'll get the warning screen instead of the normal startup screen. FYI - I only got the hard reset to work when pressing all three buttons while the unit was OFF...

I have a Vista HCX with the latest firmware. Here is what I think needs to still be fixed: 1) When I first turn on the GPS, and then turn the backlight on, don't reset the backlight to off when transitioning from the welcome page to the satellite page. Irritating when you first turn it on in the car at night, and you just want the light to stay on instead of waiting for it to get to the satellite page before turning the light on. 2) When hiking, I am getting way too much stopped time shown when I am still moving. I think that the GPS should continue to record time as moving when it loses satellites for a second unless it actually records two consecutive track pts at the same location. 3) If I get to Point A, turn off my GPS, and then turn it on again somewhere else (Point , it shows a straight track line across the map indicating that I have traveled as the crow flies from Point A to Point B, even though I never traveled it. The GPS should only show/connect tracks for points recorded while the GPS is continuously on. My map is full of crazy straight line tracks that aren't accurate. The first time I saw them I thought perhaps someone stole my GPS and flew around in a plane. LOL. Otherwise, I really like this GPS. You can tell this new chipset is way more responsive. Energy-efficient, too! dan

My Vista HCX shows the same behavior when hiking through the woods. Lot's of zero's for speed while walking, and the stopped time is always equal to or more than the moving time, even though I never stop moving. Grrr.... Seems to me that my older Legend continues to show/record your last speed instead of dropping it to zero when it loses the satellites for a second. This is perhaps where the bug is? While on in the car the moving/stopped times seem to be accurate. This is all with the latest firmware... dan

My Software Version is 2.30 and my GPS SW Version is 2.20. Not sure what the difference is between these two...

I'll check my hardware when I get home tonight.

Interesting - Garmin no longer offers firmware version 2.40 for the Vista HCX on their website. Guess I will try rolling back...

Here is my micro-review of the Vista HCX after taking it sailing to the Apostle Islands (as it compares to my last GPS, the Vista C). First, it is really sensitive. Way more than my Vista C. Seems to hold satellites way easier in the house, under canopy, etc... Walking trails on the islands, I could see that it was consistently staying around 13-15 feet of accuracy. Second, I like being able to load it up with a lot of maps. That being said, I don't think I could load a full 2 GB onto my 2 GB SD card, since there seems to be a 2000 map limit (at least with MapSource loading right to the card via GPS - haven't tried it using a card reader yet). Perhaps a firmware update will take care of this. What I don't like: The stupid "recalibrate your compass" message that comes up every time you scroll past the compass screen. This is with firmware 2.40. What were they thinking? And no, I don't want the compass on all the time. Decreases battery life and sometimes I just want to see our direction relative to the arrow, not my actual bearing. Hopefully they will fix this with the next round of firmware. The 0.0 speeds that I see all the time while walking. Also, there seems to be large fluctuations in speed that I don't think are really occurring. Doubtful that a sailboat is going from 3.2 to 4.1 to 3.0 mph every 20 seconds. Both of these things only seem to occur at slow speeds. Seems like 1/4rd of the time while walking it shows 0.0 MPH, while still showing that it is hooked up to 6 satellites. They must have another firmware problem. My old Vista C never would show this much fluctuation. The fact that when you turn it on, if you immediately turn on the backlight it will turn the light off again during the course of startup. Silly. Once again, my old Vista C wasn't like this. So do I hate it? No - I think once they get the firmware right that this GPS will be drastic improvement over anything before it. But in the mean time, I will be mildly frustrated. :-) dan