guggie

Topo 8 is a DeLorme product and would be useless on a Garmin. He meant topo 2008. a Garmin product

Amazon has the Vista HCx for $229. You can even get it delivered to you on Monday if you want. I have purchased two units from Amazon in the past year. Get your case for another $10 too. Get free topos from gpsfiledepot.com

Vista HCx trip meter, yup battery life, 25 hours easy to use, yup about $200 at Amazon compact free maps at gpsfiledepot work great waypoints, sure! You can even have custom waypoint icons that include tree stands and other outdoor icons I still get lost in the woods though, but at least I can tell people exactly where I am.

+1. Very well said (from a fellow pilot).

The Vista HCx can be used for routing in a car and is great on a bike. For both those uses, the altimeter is lots of fun. The compass is very useful since, as others have said, it will still point to your destination (geocache) when you are still, looking around the area, etc. It is a real compass, not one that you have to be moving along with in order to get a reading (that may still bounce around if your sat coverage is flakey). Get the HCx with he real compass. Check amazon for great prices. I've bought 2 from there already.

e maps need to be loaded all at once as the other poster said. free maps from gpsfiledepot do not support routing. if you want to route, get city navigator maps from garmin.

The**x series has a different chipset and is more efficient, just like laptop chipsets have gotten more efficient over the years.

Not to confuse you further but there's a difference between an electronic compass and a magnetic compass. A GPS unit with a compass has an electronic compass; either two-axis or three-axis, but either way it's electronic, not magentic. A magnetic compass relies on magnetic north, somewhat obviously, while an electronic compass uses a sat-fix to determine what direction you are moving. Edited for clarity. Needs more editing. The Vista HCx has a compass built in that reads reliably when you are not moving because it has sensors that point to the magnetic pole, like a magnetic compass should. It may have an electronic display and use micro sized electronic modules to do so, but it is clearly a GPS with a magnetic compass. It does not need a sat fix at all.

So is it fixed?

My Vista HCX, 2.80/2.80, has auto calibration on, variable elevation, scales of 640ft and 8 mile. You didn't say that you had cleared the track log during your resets. If you don't clear the log, you'll maintain the 36000ft track and that may be your problem.

Uhhh. Which charger? You didn't quote correctly.

Previous posters are all correct. I use gpsfiledepot topos with my Vista HCX regularly. I have a bunch of City Navigator maps and topos loaded. I used Mapsource to combine them and upload them. One confusing aspect of the GPS may be on the screen menu that shows options of showing and hiding different types of maps. When it says "show all City Navigator maps" that means that highlighting and clicking that choice will then show the CN maps, not that they are showing already. You're not making this simple mistake are you? I keep my gpsfiledepot topos always showing (menu choice says "hide topos") and simply toggle the CN maps between show and hide. The CN maps, when showing along with the topos, will overlay the topos and obscure them.

Is it bright enough at full brightness setting? Or is that dimmer as well when compared to what you had before?

yes. i kind of noticed it today. i used to be able to put it at 50% in the car, now it's not bright enought This is also happening on my Legend HCX but I think the overall operation may be a little different in that I think after you have set a brightness level the GPS automatically returns to the current brightness setting (in my case 50%) when a button is pressed which I don't remember happening before. In this scenario you have fewer keystrokes to come out of the no backlight setting which may be more useful in the field. My Vista HCX has always worked that way. Set the brightness where you want, press the toggle to either side to clear that slider display, and then, whenever you want, on any screen, press any button and the back light comes on at the brightness level you had set previously. It's just that my son's HCX is not as bright as mine at any setting. I'm not upgrading to 3.x if this is a new "feature" to save battery life.

Based on this post I backed up my Venture Cx waypoints before updating. After updating, my names were trashed as well. Restoring from backup saved me a lot of grief. Thanks for the warning, allory Do you notice a general decrease in screen brightness compared to earlier versions, like 2.8? My 9 month old Vista HCX with 2.8 is noticeably brighter than my son's brand new Vista HCX using version 3.1 even when set at the same slider level.

Thanks! I like this geeky stuff.

Searching using the search tool of this board is terrible. Words under 5 letters are rejected and the search will not continue. You can't search for Nuvi, HCx, 760, etc. You'll get "One or all of your search keywords were below 5 characters or you searched for words which are not allowed, such as 'html', 'img', etc, please go back and increase the length of these search keywords or choose different keywords" as a response. Use Google instead and include Groundspeak as a term or as the previous poster said.

Sounds like you have done everything that I would have done. Perhaps there is a memory corruption or actual electrical issue. Call Garmin and you will find out why I own several Garmin units instead of Magellan. BTW, I'm at version 2.8 of both the software and GPS SW.

Well having tried to use this file name format on my Garmin 60 csx, it doesn't load the maps, so I assume the firmware doesn't support it. Does anyone know if there is a fix to this problem? All the maps you want are combined together using Mapsource, then uploaded to your device in one single file called gmapsupp. You then use the menus and map setup screens on your device to select among the various maps in the file that you uploaded.

Hmmm. Do you like crispy or original recipe?

works fine

Did you make sure the connections on the ETrex were not corroded in any way? Perhaps some CAREFUL cleaning with some tuner cleaner or isopropyl alcohol might help. Don't get the spray on any neighboring plastic parts.

I'm seeing this behavior most but not all of the time when the card is in. Yes, I do use a Mac. I don't believe there's a way to stop the Finder from creating those hidden files though. Maybe I will add the removal commands to my script that runs when the card is mounted. Sometimes I've seen a large spike in elevation data at power on. Presumably this fixes that. I observed the same but tried again and it worked. It's nice to see MACs get beat up once in a while. Who would have an OS write these files to every card it sees? Bizarre.

It's probably your software, ver 3.0, and the SD card. See this thread: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php...=221591&hl=

Ok if you speak italian