kevinkessler

I've used a PN-40 for the last 2 months, and it's true I don't have any problems reading the screen in bright sunlight. What I think might be underrated, though, is how tough the unit is. I think Joe Flacco could toss this unit 50 yards to Mark Clayton (who would drop it), and then Troy Polamalu could run over and stomp it into the marshy Heinz field, and it would still work (you might guess I'm a bitter Ravens fan). I haven't actually used one of the Garmin OR or Co units, but I'm questioning their ability to take a lot of abuse. The real failings of these units, is the software and the interface. For the interface, there is no way to make the available input buttons into anything that would resemble a useful keyboard input, so the thought that you could enter a log entry more interesting than TFTC quite unlikely. Since I always carry a pen for the micro-caches, it is not a big deal for me to scribble my logs down on a piece of paper. The software is more of a problem. Topo 7 is complicated because they did not comply with any of the normal interface patterns that people are use to. Why do they have to have some sort of weird tabbed interface along the bottom, instead of the normal MDI menus along the top? I'm sure some developer would give you a long list why his app is so unique that this must be the case, but, in the end, he created an app that is always pointed out as a weakness of the product. And now they are going to release a new caching app, and guess what. It isn't going to look like a normal Windows/Mac/Linux app; it is going to be some sort of widget. They seem to think that there is no use in leveraging people's existing knowledge of application interfaces. In the end, I think all they really have to do is increase the number of waypoints they support, and increase the number of characters they allow in the cache description, and it will be the perfect GPS for me. I think for the good of their company, though, they have to get rid of the "arcane interface equals serious tools" mentality, and this could become THE GPSr.

How big is the file? The general rule of thumb that seems to help is to keep the rasters to 1GB or less...if they start getting too much above that, performance suffers. Thanks, my map image was 1.6 Gb. I divvied the map up into 4 maps, and it is a lot more usable now. I really appreciate all the posts people like you and Cowboy Papa put out there. Without your posts, I'd have returned this device or chucked it out the window by now. It's an act of total hubris to expect people to read a 300 page manual to simply send some waypoints to a GPSr.

Is there something in the configuration of the device, or the downloading/compilation of the maps that affects the rendering speed? I was out geocaching for the first time today with the color maps installed on an SD card. When I was on a zoom level that would show just the Topo7 type data, the device worked great, but as soon as I zoomed to a level where it display the color image maps, it would take 30-45 seconds to render the screen. I heard the the PN-40 was much faster than the PN-20 at this, but 30+ seconds is really unusable to me.

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