Ken in Regina

I use City Navigator North America 2009 on my eTrex Legend HCx and it works fine. There's no text-to-speech on an eTrex so you won't get voice guidance, obviously. But you get beeps in advance of the turns and it flashes a good visual guidance on the screen. I wouldn't want to depend on it for regular auto nav but for handheld navigation, say when trying to find a restaurant on foot or get back to your hotel in a strange city, or for occasional auto navigation it works. ...ken...

It's still squashed on mine. No improvement there. ...ken...

Be nice. It's your oil tank.

I use my eTrex Legend HCx on my mountain bike. Garmin makes an excellent handlebar mount for it. It has wonderful battery life. I have a 2GB microSD card in it with maps from Topo Canada, Metroguide Canada and the excellent free Ibycus topo 2.1. When I go for a ride in the mountains I search the internet for track files and load them up before I go. They are very helpful when I ride in areas I am not familiar with. I don't mind the location of the buttons because I stop if I need to play with the GPS. It's too easy to run into rocks and trees when you are trying to play with the GPS instead of looking where you are going. I find it quite easy to use with light riding gloves and it works great for one hand because the side buttons allow you to squeeze instead of pushing. ...ken...

Dies ist keine gute Stelle für bewegliche Browser. Ich habe meine Handfläche anprobiert und habe gefunden, dass diese Stelle ist nicht freundlich dafür Browser ist. Wenn mein Deutsch schlecht ist, ist es die FreeTranslation.com, zu tadeln. ------------ This is not a good site for mobile browsers. I have tried on my Palm and found that this site is not friendly for it's browser. If my German is bad it is the FreeTranslation.com to blame. ...ken...

The difference is the "H". (cue rimshot) If I understand Garmin's model designations correctly, the "H" means High sensitivity, which means the HCx has much superior GPS receiver technology (the "C" is Colour, the "x" means eXpandable, eg. uses memory card). I have the Legend HCx and it is very good. Quick to acquire a lock and holds that lock in very difficult conditions. Probably the worst test is in my basement office. My office is directly underneath the cold air return (sheet metal). It will get as many as 7 satellites sometimes. I have two USB receivers and two Bluetooth receivers that all have SirfStarIII or similar technology in them. They are excellent receivers. My Legend HCx is better. However, the Legend is not a good device if you want to do paperless caching with only one device. If you want to use a Palm PDA or something similar for all the clues and just put the locations into the Legend HCx, it's good for that. You can download straight into it from the Pocket Queries on here, or from your MyGarmin account on Garmin's website. They will go into the Legend as geocaches and have the appropriate icon assigned to them. And you can mark them as found when you find them. But you can't load the clues and you can't add any notes about the finding. You'll need another device for those. Or paper. ...ken...

I used GMAPtool happily earlier this week and it ran just fine. Now AVG (free) is declaring that it has a problem: "Trojan horse Patched_c.BKP" It refuses to let me do anything with it. I'm checking here in case someone with a different virus checker (with up to date definitions, please) can give me a sanity check. Can someone tell me if any other virus checker sees a problem with GMAPtool? I have v0.40b. I downloaded it a couple weeks ago from the author's site (wgmaptool040b.zip). The reason I'm suspicious is because it worked great when I used it a few days ago and I have had no problems with my system since then. But AVG has had a definition file update since then and now it's complaining. Sounds like a classic false positive to me, but I sure would appreciate some second opinions from users of GMAPtool with other virus checkers. Thanks for your help. ...ken...

Here in Regina, Princess Auto and Peavy Mart both carry the modern style that Red90 mentioned. The Coop usually as them, too. ...ken...

Did you pay a restocking fee? Or just the return shipping? It sounds like there are two issues here. First is the warranty issue. Perhaps as a defective unit out of the box you should have gone after Garmin on the manufacturer's warranty. Does GPSCity have a warranty? What did they say about warranty? In my experience, most retailers have return and/or exchange policies but few have warranties. Most leave it to the manufacturer's warranty. Second is the GPSCity return/exchange policy. Here's my experience. I bought a Venture HC from them. When it arrived I took it out of the box, tried it and immediately discovered didn't like the limitations of not having an expansion memory card. I phoned them and told them I wanted to return it for a Legend HCx. We decided that a refund on the Venture and new purchase on the Legend would be the easiest way to do it because on an exchange they won't ship until they receive the returned unit (a reasonable policy, IMO). They gave me an RMA and I shipped the Venture back at my cost (again, reasonable, IMO). There was never any discussion of a restocking fee. Not even a mention of one. I found them quite reasonable to deal with. I'm surprised they would charge you one to return a defective unit. ...ken...

I can assure you that Topo Canada is not locked. ...ken...

The simple answer is, No, you can't copy them onto a single card. Yes, you are stuck with one map at a time. That's not as big a deal as it sounds. You can't display them both simultaneously on the GPS anyway. Either you fumble around swapping map cards or you fumble around in the menus on the GPS to turn on the one you want to see and turn off the other one. Neither is a big deal, only a minor nuisance. ...ken...

MtnHermit, have you considered turning your track files into transparent overlay maps? Some people do that. In a couple of other threads Red90 and a couple of others have described methods and pointed to tools. The reason I mentioned it is that going through that process might give you more flexibility to do some annotation along the way. Of course the simplest, as someone else mentioned earlier in the thread, is just to assign different colours to the individual tracks in Mapsource and load them back to the GPS. You still won't get direction but at least it will be easier to distinguish them. On my iQue 3600 I can change the setting for "Display on map" to turn it on or off, on the fly, right on the GPS for each individual named track file. That helps avoid confusion when I have multiple tracks with significant overlap. I just turn off the ones I don't want displayed at the moment. I haven't messed with my Legend to see if I can do that on the fly on individual named tracks. ...ken...

Just to clarify. On the map above the red lines are the allowed trails for motorized use. The green lines are non-motorized only. That map is a clip of the official management area map. So although you can drive over the pass, it is not allowed. Yes, they have changed the rules considerably since we used to ride there. The last time I took a casual drive through the area a couple years ago I saw that they have also bulldozed a huge number of the 4x4 hunting and forestry trails we used to ride on so that they are only usable for hiking or horses or, in some cases, have disappeared completely. I suspect it might have had something to do with the hordes of bikers who started coming down from Calgary on weekends with chainsaws strapped on the back of their motocross bikes, after they had been chased out of the Kananaskis. It was pretty obvious they had no intention of staying on established trails, as was the rule back then. ...ken...

When I was looking at the eTrex I was flipping a coin between the Venture HC or the Legend HCx (colour is usually a nobrainer for me). I decided to cheap out and get the Venture. I figured 24MB would be lots. ......Not!! I opened it up and tried to load the minimum amount of maps I would be comfortable with for a single outing and wasn't able to get close. In less than an hour after opening, I had boxed the Venture back up, got an RMA from the retailer and mailed it back in exchange (plus a few more hard-earned but well-spent dollars) for the Legend HCx. I have been patting myself on the back ever since. 2GB microSD cards have become cheap like dirt. I love being able to put all the maps and other stuff on and still have spare space for saving track files. Just one person's personal preference. ...ken...

With BestBuy Canada or FutureShop Canada, all you have to do is read the back of one of their receipts. It's pretty clear. And really simple. The biggest thing people do is to NOT read the receipt. They get the thing home, open it up, totally destroy the packaging, throw the packaging and half or all of the accompanying documentation in the garbage, and then try to take the thing back in pieces in a Safeway bag two weeks later. Maybe with the receipt, if they didn't also toss it out with the packaging. I've stood in line behind more than my fair share of these clowns and listened to them whine about how they didn't know they needed the packaging and the receipt and get all outraged and into the customer service person's face that they weren't being treated fairly. A surprising number of people actually get away with it if they at least treat the customer service person politely and apologize for neglecting to keep the packaging and/or bill. The only thing the stores ask for is that you retain the original packaging and documentation and receipt. That doesn't seem like so much. I have never had a problem returning things to either BestBuy or FutureShop. ...ken...

Grasscatcher, What I'm hearing is that you have one set of maps in EGPS that you can't use on the GPS. And you have another set of maps in the GPS and Mapsource that you can't use in EGPS. That's two different sets of maps. I'm hearing that the maps in EGPS have different details than the maps in the GPS and Mapsource. That can be helpful or confusing, depending on what you are trying to accomplish. I'm hearing that you have to save the track file(s) out into a different file format from Mapsource's default to move them from Mapsource to EGPS and then you have to open them in a different format than Mapsource's default format to get the track file(s) back into Mapsource. That's "conversion" in my thirty year IT professional experience. Not rocket science. Not even particularly complicated if you're already familiar with the process. But if you aren't already familiar with it, it might as well be rocket science because you're going to need some help to get it figured out. The process you use -- using the extra detail in the EGPS maps to create a track before you actually travel the planned route, so you can basically use it as a route to follow the very first time -- makes a whole bunch of sense. But the original poster was asking about working with an existing track file. I do apologize for splitting hairs because it appears that what the original poster wants to do can't be done in Mapsource anyway. I just wanted to clarify whether I was hearing and understanding the process with EGPS correctly or if I was missing something crucial. ...ken...

When I used to ride out in the Lynx Creek area back in the 80's the road past the Castle Ski area (South Castle Road??) used to go all the way up to the southernmost of the lakes that were labelled "Rainy Lakes" on my Forest Service map. You couldn't get a four wheel vehicle all the way up there but you could get all the way on a two-wheel vehicle. Back then you could probably get a 4x4 over the Middle Kootenay Pass if you were a good driver. On two wheels it was pretty easy except for a couple of fairly gnarly climbs. Don't know what it's like now. It might be worthwhile to add the QuadSquad maps. They are a transparent overlay like the Calgary Area Trail maps that Red90 pointed you at but they are for the Crowsnest Pass area. Those folks have mapped nearly everything short of mountain goat tracks in an area from just west of Pincher Creek nearly to Fernie and from the US border up to about halfway between #3 and #1 highways. (Oops, I see Red90 posted a link to the Ozi map on their site. They also have a Garmin map that installs directly into Mapsource so you can combine it with another map to load onto your GPS.) ...ken...

But Grasscatcher, what is the use if you can't also put those maps onto the GPS? It's all well and good to be able to look at pretty pictures on the PC but if the reason you bought the GPS is to use it, and its maps, it seems like having to use two completely different sets of maps is a real pain. This is especially a problem if the entire point of manipulating those track files is so you can use them on the GPS. Now you're faced with the issue of having to convert back and forth. What am I missing? ...ken... eTrex Legend HCx, Topo Canada, Ibycus Topo 2.1

I have used GPS Central, GPS City and Prairie Geomatics. I have purchased from all of them on the internet and had excellent service from all three. I have purchased from GPS Central and GPS City several times each. ...ken...

Looks like I don't have maps with DEM data on them. ...ken...

Hi Rifty, I'm seeing the same as you with my Legend HCx. I have tried every combination of what has been described so far and I can't find anything that looks like a profile screen. ...ken...

Yes, you can use the City Navigator map card in the Nuvi and the Vista ... only one at a time, of course. No, you cannot update the maps in the Nuvi from the card. With the card in the Nuvi you will be able to select the new maps and use them as long as the card is in the unit. But when you take the card out it will revert to the internal maps. It uses the maps directly from the card. It won't let you update the internal maps. ...ken...

It sounds like this is happening: 1) If you already have the original mapset (eg. City Navigator North America 2009NT) installed on your PC with Mapsource (from the DVD) but do not have it preloaded in the unit, the update gets added to Mapsource. 2) If you do not have the original mapset installed on the PC, eg. it's only preloaded in the unit, the update just updates the unit. 3) If you have the original mapset installed on the PC AND preloaded in the unit, the update gets added to Mapsource AND updates the preloaded set in the unit. At least, that's what we seem to be seeing so far. ...ken...

My Garmin iQue 3600 is vintage 2002 technology. I've had many occasions to check the elevation on numerous trips through the Rockies to the Left Coast. On trips to Vancouver, when on the beach at White Rock it never reads sea level but it's never off by more than 3 or 4 meters. Fortunately it's always a little high so I haven't had to worry about getting my feet wet. When driving through mountain passes and passing the elevation signs at the top of the pass, it's rarely out by more than 3 or 4 meters. Most days it's within a 3 or 4 meters in my driveway. I normally use it with an external antenna when driving. That makes it just about the equivalent of my newer receivers (eTrex Legend HCx, GPS10x, BU-353) for speed of acquisition and holding a fix in difficult conditions. Not quite, but just about. ...ken...

I've often wondered what's the point. If I'm using the GPS altitude to calibrate the barometer, why not just use the GPS altitude? ... Just mumbling out loud... ...ken...