iamasmith

I'm finding myself reading this as a UK user with a 60CSx and and Oregon 300. The 60CSx was great.. the Oregon promised and still tries to promise convenience but has NEVER really been as good as the 60CSx as a basic unit. It's now out of production and seems to be less well maintained than the 60CSx ever was.. I mean they at least they got it to a good working state and everybody was happy - hell, with the 60CSx everybody was happy with 2-3 revs of software updates. No, Garmin went on an R&D feature spurge with a new platform and the first few hardware platforms didn't cut the mustard to run it.. problems with the Cartesio chipset plagued the Oregon and I think still do, then the Dakota came.. then the 62 series and now the Montana (gladly I didn't even have the Colorado). I'm beginning to wonder if Garmin are going to go through the other 47 states with new units headlining and being discontinued before finally having a unit to continue with. See the problem when we see the Garmin 'Delaware' and I'm sure the 'New Jersey' will even appear at some point. ANYWAY, I'm a UK user so even less choice and I'm totally ****** off by Garmin's approach that they will choose to do crummy raster maps rather than maintain detailed vector maps. I have Garmin Topo UK and the OSM variants as vector and man they by far outshine the GB Discoverer maps when you are out on the trail.. who wants to see a 30yd wide pixel when walking :s So, even after this investment, including lifetime Nuvi Maps for the Garmin, some GB Discover download products, my TOPO GB etc. all unit tied now, and the yearly satellite imagery subscription I'm considering if it's actually better to chuck the lot and go for a Magellan Explorist 510 or a 610. It seems I can get the aerial imagery for the unit now, they offer that kind of service.. it would be interesting to know if the World Map they offer was any cop and what the European Map is like on the 610... any users out there?

Yep I have this problem too. Went away to Scotland for a couple of weeks over Christmas and didn't generate one whilst away. Came back, triggered it, nothing. 1 WEEK later I got a processed My Finds automatically Not been able to get one since.

A hat for sure with a brim or a baseball cap - I've gone back to wearing my Tilley T3 that's been to many a remote location with me. GPS, Pen and Hat are the crucial things for me. You will spend a lot of time pushing through twigs and undergrowth. Keep that hat on and your head down whilst going through ^^

Since I use my D9 as my only watch whilst in holiday (not trusting hotel safes) and this is marginally smaller I figure I can live with the size

Unbelievable, you got me thinking about it and I managed to convince myself that I wanted a Suunto Core even after saying I wasn't looking for a watch.

I'm wondering about the advantages of having a device like this alongside a GPSr? For wilderness use I would always have paper maps and a Silva compass as a backup and know how to navigate that way so the main advantage I can see is having a barometer and altimeter on the unit but my Oregon gives me altitude.. I am interested in this but partly because I'm a bit like a magpie when I see gadgets and have an urge to collect. I do tend to research quite a lot before I buy and my thoughts on these types of device are as follows. Please correct me if I'm wrong. GPS watches are produced by Garmin with a fitness market in mind. That seems practical because you don't want the GPS bouncing around when you are running. No attempt to collar the wilderness traveller market here, they are urged towards the great handhelds that they produce and mapping really brings the experience to life. In fact it is difficult to imagine using GPS without mapping apart from as a backup and an instant location finder for paper maps. Tracking is what these watches seem all about. Suunto produce a massive range of watches for the outdoor environment but only one current model with integrated GPSr, the X10,X10M,X10Mi - basically the X10 slightly different variants (not sure that the X10Mi offers that is different to the X10M). These watches are waterproof to 100m (IPX8?) whilst Garmins models only state IPX7 (Can take a 1/2 hr dunk to 1m). The great extra thing that the X10 seems to offer is some intelligence in the form of storm warnings with large barometer shifts. It has GPSr and you can set up waypoints prior to a trip but as a primary source of navigation when you have a GPSr and you would backup with maps and a compass? Not so sure. All these GPSr watches suffer to some extent because they have to power a GPSr and need recharging daily when in constant use. You can get Solar panels and AA driven chargers for them but that just means they are slightly less convenient than the handhelds where you can swap batteries and in a watch form factor you probably don't want to be bothering with all that hassle. Suunto also has the t6c watch and variants like it but again this is aimed at training. It moves the GPSr external to an ANT protocol pod so that you can use GPS as one of the many inputs for training but the watch doesn't seem to offer quite the array of features that the X10 does. I actually think that the better choice is to go without GPSr on a watch that is aimed at wilderness use, mainly because of battery consumption, but can only really cite the convenience of the Barometer/Altimeter as the function to have. The Oregon provides the barometer but it doesn't have warnings for storms like the Suunto X10 does - maybe this is a bit of a gimmic (thoughts?). Incidentally my Suunto D9 dive computer has an electronic compass. It shuts off after 1 min of use so you have to re-sight if you can't find a reference and I find that to be useless. I always use my real compass that is on my gauge console instead. So do you think the wilderness compasses on these computers are better to sight with? So if the Terra in its nice robust package offered some of the barometer goodies and that compass was actually useful then it might have some convenience advantages for estimating your time to summit. What are your thoughts folks? I presume as you are posting here you are using your Suunto Core's alongside some GPSr. What do you like most about them? Do you think the Terra improves on that with smaller form factor and robustness given the features that really matter to you if you have a GPSr anyway?

Interesting, I'm not in the market for a watch but I was interested in hearing that this is Sapphire Crystal. My watch is Sapphire Crystal and has been through a lot of punishment and still looks as good as the day that I got it but I didn't know Suunto were using Sapphire Crystal now. I have a Suunto D9 dive computer and was pretty miffed that they use Mineral Crystal on those since its not hard to imagine the thing getting a scratch off a tank or whilst you are moving around on a swaying boat. For those that don't know the difference Sapphire Crystal is about 5 times as hard as Mineral Crystal.

Ouch!, I suppose that you made sure they didn't just add a baud rate setting and have it default to something other than 4800? (unlikely since most equipment that you link to is 4800 baud only). ..and you did report it to Garmin didn't you?

So what's the limit now? 4GB? 16GB? Anyone know? FAT file system limits the file size to 4Gb. Cards?, who knows the Garmin support artical still says 2Gb is the max :S

Don't forget that whilst we are getting these very frequent beta updates we are seeing a lot of new features being added too! If we can keep the beta going until version 4.00 we may get our EPE circle and landscape mode

Can't verify it right now because my 60CSx is at home but IIRC if you save the tracks to the storage card they go in here.

I noticed they changed that which prompted me to return to this thread... I got to wondering if Garmin had silently issued a new revision product. (note the manual still states Backlit TFT display) Having just taken my OR out into the bright sunlight and turned the brightness right down I can see no perceptible difference between it on full or completely off so I think it probably is transflective although it lacks an illuminance sensor that most such devices have.

For me the problem went away with GE5 beta. I just drag-drop my GPX track straight into GE and make sure the time base sliders are set correctly. Works a treat now. (running 2.97 beta on Oregon 300)

It could definitely be what you said about the clear view. Remember this display doesn't necessarily need to show what it can actually see. That is going to be dependent upon the GPS firmware. The approximate elevation and azimuth information should be available from the almanac (hence you see them grey on the chart) and the fact that you don't even have white bars for those two birds means that there is no discernable signal coming through. I suspect if you saw the group of GPGSV NMEA strings out of the unit at that point you would see 0 for the Signal to Noise Ratio value for those birds. If not then it could well be that the data is discarded (test bits set etc.?) as I think you are speculating..?

Anecdotal comments on Photography Blogs and Reviews are saying pretty much what you would expect... 1. Longish acquisition times. 2. Poor accuracy. 3. Poor battery life. In fact one blog went on to say that even with the GPS turned off the P6000 couldn't take more than (IIRC) 260 shots on one charge. The serious photographers seem to be more interested in their SLRs that have Bluetooth or another data expansion capability and using an external GPS to provide data to the camera... or capturing tracks and matching them up later.

Just to confirm I diff'ed (compared) the Oregon 200 and 400 versions and they are identical so I think it's safe to assume that the real 300 version is identical too. BTW: It's not just the gupdate.gcd file that's identical. The INSTALLERS are identical between the 200 and 400 so there is obviously no unit checking.

Google Earth also uses gpsbabel for the real time tracking. Basically it keeps spawning it to generate a kml file and reads the location off that.

Actually it isn't transflective.

Bright sunlight is a pain.. luckily (:S) we don't get a lot of it here. If you are wearing sunnies then you will almost certainly have to take them off to see the screen. It isn't unbearable for caching but I've heard a lot of people on bikes complain that it is unusable. I think if you get one being prepared for the worst that you won't be too disappointed but it's a shame that they didn't use a transflective screen to add little more contrast on brighter days. On the plus side it rocks for night caching ++++

I have an ixus 750 (won't change soon because I have a Dive Housing for it too) and an Oregon.. does that bit of software allow you to Geotag photos that already made it into iPhoto '09? I found with Basecamp you had to copy them out (from the original locations to avoid iPhoto re-orientating the portrait shots and screwing the file time), delete them and put them back to get places to recognise the co-ordinates.

Test #3, unfortunately I didn't have my 60CSx with me today but it was nice and sunny Blue = WAAS enabled, Green = Turned off WAAS and backtracked, Red = Walked same path in same direction as Blue with WAAS still off. I was fairly careful to walk within 6" of the positions for each track... (really annoying some folks when I wouldn't step off line) and all three tracks are within 5 mins. Interestingly this time both the WAAS and non WAAS varies and this time I had the GPSr at hip height in the Oregon sturdy case. In the previous test (where it matched the 60CSx) I had the unit in a breast pocket of a Tilley VOMP I was wearing (LISTEN, I'm trying set a standard for geek uniform here ) and it was similar in results to the 60CSx lower down in one of the side pockets... I'm now wondering if the unit is really getting thrown off quite considerably and isn't taking into account attenuation if your body is in the way. Cup your hand over the top of the Oregon and watch the signal drop... horrible!... do the same on a 60CSx and actually it drops about the same but the 60CSx still tracks better. More testing to come.

Yep, for a lot of the Topos you still need MapConvert, some of the CityNavs now come with a copy prebuilt for RoadTrip. Check the DVD, if it has a *.gmap on it then use MapManager with that and it will install, otherwise you will need Fusion or something to install the map under Windows and use MapConvert to make the gmap.

Thanks, I saw this reference on your wiki but didn't see that it was verified. To add to the issue this is listed as a Rino accessory and therefore not widely available in the UK. I think I might play around with libusb and ruby-usb first but I might return to this because for the field test there's nothing quite as portable as a Zaurus for logging that data and I suspect that the GPS might want far more juice out of the USB port than the Zaurus can give

Can anyone confirm for sure a working cable that will produce serial NMEA out for the Oregon without using Spanner and Garmin's proprietary transport for it?

WOW, I'm going to Egypt soon and didn't even consider checking!, I always take my 60CSx to mark off the dive site locations. *EDIT* and there are a couple of established caches near where I'm going in Dahab.....