insig

Select the filter tab of the geocaching app. Tap Status and uncheck "Found". Go back to the list of caches, and the found ones will be gone out of that list.

Map drawing is processor-intensive, so it's going to eat up the battery faster if you leave the map displayed -- especially if you leave the map displayed in track up mode because of all the extra work necessary to rotate the entire map. The good news is that you probably won't need the backlight, so that saves a lot of power. Sorry I don't have any real-world figures for you. I haven't tried leaving it on all day. I'm usually hopping in and out of the car and plugging it in when driving.

http://www8.garmin.com/support/download_details.jsp?id=3888 3.60 added chirp detection, and 3.70 is the current software version. You can get the latest software using WebUpdater.

It is a USB charger, but USB charging can take on multiple power levels. The common one is 500mA ("standard"), but more recently, 1A has become available ("high power"). If it is 1A, you can get some good charging speed with Garmin's battery pack. If it is 500mA, your normal high-speed AA charger will stomp all over it. Suffice it to say, I'm not willing to void my warranty to find out the charging rate with a pair of Eneloop XXs. It is still a rubber plug. A differently designed one which is a bit harder to push back into place, but shouldn't have any issues keeping water out. I believe the official cigarette lighter adapter cranks the current up to 1A. I'm not sure on other adapters.

There's a button in the battery case of the Oregon that has to be pressed down for it to charge the batteries. The OEM battery pack pressed the button down. Just sticking in two NiMH batteries won't press down the button, so it won't charge them.

NiMH can be used, it's just that the only batteries that it will recharge when plugged in are the ones in the OEM battery pack. Eneloops work just like the have in past handhelds.

When the Montana is in landscape orientation, the keyboard switches to qwerty. I never use it because I always have mine locked in portrait orientation.

Heck my eTrex 30 can draw the map Nuvi style and beep. I just found it easier to "in 300 metres, turn left onto Winston Churchill Boulevard, then keep right". (Also the tiny eTrex screen is a bit hard to follow). I do agree the new Oregon's will be a great GPS - but for screen size and ease of reading you're not going to beat a Nuvi (or Montana) size screen. Yes, the etrex can draw a map, but the Oregon looks like a tiny nuvi complete with the speed limit sign and everything. I'm not disagreeing with you on anything though. It's no substitute for a nuvi or a Montana, but it is much better than an etrex or a 62 for road navigation.

A GPSr with a touch screen makes entering coordinates really easy. On Garmin handhelds like the Dakota, Oregon, and Montana from the main menu you can select Where To? -> Coordinates and then enter the coordinates.

My criteria at the time was how little could I pay. I thought $30 was a pretty good deal. My Nuvi 265 , as far as I know, does NOT read GPX files like Pocket Queries. But I don't care as I use GSAK to kick out all the caches as POI files - I have 35,000 loaded on my Nuvi at the moment. There are ways to make the caches show up at more zoom levels but they are not for the feint of heart. Figure out a Nuvi that has the features you require, and don't worry pretty much all of them can have caches loaded on them one way or another. If you have a handheld with paperless geocaching support then all you really need is name and location which is easy to do with GSAK/POI. This is something I'll definitely take into consideration. I came across this thread because I was debating waiting for the Oregon 650's to be released or just purchase a Montana 650 that can be a hand held plus a car navigation. I don't hike a lot so the weight of the Montana wouldn't be a huge disadvantage. The new Oregons do have a nuvi mode similar to the Montana. It's a smaller screen and it will only beep at you instead of talking to you. However, the Montana is much easier to read in the car because of the bigger screen.

Wow. That's quite an endorsement! Yeah, having had the opportunity to use a Dakota in the past, I can say that there is no contest between it and the Oregon 600.

It's the nicest looking screen I've ever seen on a handheld GPSr. I was out last weekend in the early evening and didn't even have to use the backlight. I think one thing that really helps it is the lack of that extra layer that the resistive touch screens have.

Ah, I believe the topo 100k map you have is using TIGER2000 road data which is (in)famously known for roads being off by a hundred feet or more in some areas. That's probably why it isn't routable -- it would keep yelling at you for being off the road! As long as you're routinely finding geocaches with it, your device is performing fine.

It sounds like you only have the basemap that came with the etrex. It's a very rudimentary map that contains a (comparatively) rough representation of major roads. It's got roads and cities over the entire world in a 90 MB file. For comparison, the road maps that are preloaded on automotive GPS devices are several GB (1 GB is about 1000 MB) in size and only cover a portion of the world (like the US & Canada), so they're much more detailed and represent the roads more accurately. Imagine that the basemap is like someone trying to draw a circle, but they only have eight spots that they can use. The result is something that is shaped like a stop sign rather than a circle. In order to draw that circle, you need much more detailed information. In effect, the map is playing 'connect the dots' to represent a road. The problem is, there aren't that many dots to use, so the road might be off by a hundred feet. More points along the road for it to use makes the map much more accurate. That's the kind of stuff that makes the map take up a whole lot more memory. You can get official Garmin maps like City Navigator, topo 100k, or topo 24k. There are also some free topographical at gpsfiledepot.com or you can go to http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ for free street maps. Personally, I lean towards Garmin's topo maps because I think they look nicer. When it comes to street maps, I've found that depending upon the coverage in your area, the free ones are pretty comparable to the official ones as far as road coverage goes. I don't really use them for lots of POI searching, so I'm not that familiar with how good they are there.

Has anyone else noticed that custom maps can be individually enabled / disabled?

insig, could you tell us something about the speed using 50k waypoints? Is it usable any more? Uploading more than 4k waypoints to my 450t makes it so slow that it is not usable any more, moving the map one inch takes 10 to 20 seconds to refresh the screen (map with less details on internal memory, gpx also stored on internal memory). I live in berlin, 4k waypoints with my homelocation as center point means driving 15 minutes by car (any direction) and there are no caches on the screen any more :-( It's much more responsive than an older Oregon. Responsiveness also depends on what else is being drawn on the screen. There are some maps out there that have insane amounts of detail, and they take forever to draw. I'm running with city navigator US and the basemap. It is definitely an upgrade from a 450. I'd say it is even more responsive than the Montana. Also, if you're using waypoints, it might be trying to draw their names on the map. With geocaches, it doesn't draw the names on the map, so that probably makes it faster.

This is just a brief answer to some of your questions: Here's the Montana User Manual. Here's an unofficial wiki. For satellite imagery, check out BirdsEye Satellite Imagery from Garmin. You can also create your own raster imagery overlays (like a picture of a park or trail map). See Trail Tech blog for details. If you want road maps, the official City Nav maps will give you speed limits and TTS information (example: "Turn left on Main Street"). You'll need the automotive mount or a set of headphones to get it to talk to you. Free alternative map sources: http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/ contains a lot of free topographical maps. http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ will get you free street maps, but it won't speak the road names to you. It will only tell you "in one quarter mile, turn left" for example. Also, there isn't any speed limit information available.

Stored as geocaches accessed through the geocaching application. Wow that's incredible!! Now all we have to do is find a way to keep them up to date Chris Yep, stored as geocaches. Sadly, the pocket queries of the entire state of Nevada that I have are about a year old. I don't plan on going to Nevada any time soon, but the notion that I have them all is really cool.

The "unlimited" geocaches feature refers to Garmin's plan to supply geocaches in a .GGZ file from their own website. So far this is still vapourware and hasn't yet been demonstrated as far as I know. However the 600 series will also hold 12,000 geocaches using .GPX files. You can presumably load 12 PQs using different file names to fill the Oregon 600/650, or use GSAK to handle your PQs, and then combine the 12,000 geocaches you want to find into a single file for the Oregon. Chris You can load "unlimited" geocaches using GPX files alone. I've got ~50,000 loaded exclusively by GPX files taken from a combination of sources including some local cachers' old pocket queries.