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I wonder what sort of current it takes to permanently damage the battery pack. It’s a slow charge, but funny pondering the possibility that everyone leaves units on charge face down, so battery gunk leaks through the card slot, and ruins the PCBs. It’s not a problem that particularly bothers me. At least it doesn’t interfere with the device working, but I’d have thought it something the manufacturer should be concerned about.

Garmin (via Facebook) told me to contact support for an engineering ticket about other bugs, but I don’t think it’s worth the time. Especially where others have the same problem. They would probably just tell you to do a master reset, which I’ve already done, and maybe in the end, exchange the unit, but they might as well just swap units around amongst the people that returned them

Same thing here after at least 16 hours (possibly up to 17). It looks like the battery is fully charged, but the charging graphic keeps animating here as well.

Thanks for the replies Atlas, do you have a rough figure for current draw with backlight off in usual operation?

I’m pretty sure mine did stop charging, but I’ve put it on again now to be sure.

Hi I’ve just some questions about Garmin Chirp beacon... 1) Does anyone know what the penalty is with regard to battery life for the GPS device if Chirp searching is left on full time? 2) Do geocache databases supplied to GPS units have some flag to indicate they have a Chirp with them so the user knows to activate searching? 3) For anyone who has actually placed one... Did you get the whole year out of the supplied battery? Cheers

Obviously not! Kind of, but a resistor would be turned on to heat the crystal oven to make the freq stable, rather than adjust a DDS to compensate. UBlox have a page about oscillators, and the same manufacturer produces GPS modules with TXXO and without. I guess the handhelds do have them, or they wouldn’t be able to even maintain the appearance of keeping up.

The easiest way I can get it to turn itself off without entering a known sequence of buttons that will do so, is to zoom out far and make it draw a big detailed map screen. If it can manage that, then moving around the map at that level with the pointer will surely crash it before long. Then when it’s turned back on, it’s going to try to draw the same map display as before, and simply turn straight back off again. What I think was happening is I took it in the car after one of these shutdowns. It would have to either get a position fix, or at least be trying to rotate to a different bearing before trying to draw it’s first map screen so that it was doing something different. I have little doubt that if I’d turned it on and got it displaying a map first (at a closer level) it would have been fine.

I’m not lying when I say I don’t trust it enough to use it But I’m going by their own user manual in "Satellite Settings”, and also people on GPS forums claim to have tested the difference. So all that’s left is if one of the GPS module updates that have been released has improved the power performance for multiple service support. I doubt it No identical sets of batteries here to test. Are you into wasting four new batteries to find out? I might be if they were already here.

Did I say sub meter accuracy? No, Let’s make that down to millimetres margin of error with relatively cheap hardware. This is not some glimpse into the future. You can buy a stock mass market GPS module with centimetre level accuracy right now, and it’s actually old news: https://www.u-blox.com/en/high-precision-positioning

I agree entirely, except that the GPS is featured in a way with alerts so that your phone could stay in your backpack unless you actually have to make a call. But in the end, I wouldn’t care at all if all connected features were simply deleted tomorrow in exchange for a more reliable update regarding the real function of a mapping GPS I’m trying to at least give them props for something. It’s hot here now, so there’s no clouds, or anything to show on the radar, but they are nice computer generated clouds for cloud cover, and it’s good that you don’t have to tell it where you are. When it’s fixed not to break something else, I’d have to admit it’s a nice job, even if just from a demo point of view.

A TCXO would be a power guzzler in a handheld. They shouldn’t be needed because the temperature coefficient of the crystal is known. You only need to monitor the temperature inside the unit (which Garmin handhelds do), and you can offset the drift fairly accurately. If power consumption is of no concern. Not at all. New technology exists for fairly ordinary hardware to independently obtain accuracy down to sub meter accuracy with carrier phase recievers. By the time the error was turned off in the early days so that civilians could access today’s kind of accuracy, it was already moot. Farmers worked out that the error was uniform across all civilian units, so they only needed to put a GPS in a known location, and send the offset for the true location to a second receiver (the unit that is actually moving), and then add the offset from the stationery unit to the reported coordinates of the second unit, and then you have overcome any deliberate error that the Government introduced, and are only left to suffer inherent error from both GPS receivers.

I had a play with the Weather app thingy over wifi that I was rather impressed with. Though I’m not fussed about connected features, it is very tidy... or at least until I tried to make these screenshots to show others: https://imgur.com/a/IaX0vQF https://imgur.com/a/378ylw6 To capture these, of course I don’t want to show the world my location, so I turned GPS off, and set an arbitrary position for simulation from the Satellite screen. Then capturing the screens in a fake location was fine, but then when setting a different position on a map again from the Satellite screen, the entire weather app context is displayed again! From there, you can’t browse the map again for at least the entire power cycle. Not a big deal for this scenario, but I’ll bet there’s other areas a map view will be needed when the Weather app will essentially be displayed instead.

Never as far as I know. I was only suggesting a possible way you could bypass the shutdown or freeze you have by not making the quit button return to the map screen. ie. begin making or finding waypoints, etc. from some screen other than the map screen, and then when you exit the menu, it won’t try to exit to map screen. EDIT,, Actually it’s Cheminer Will I’m talking about here... I think it could prevent his unit turning off in the situation he’s describing.

That’s basically what I mean, yes. I’d expect FIND and MARK buttons to do the same thing no matter where you are in the GUI, and for every GPSMAP model as far back as those buttons exist, but I only tested from the Compass screen, and they do as they are supposed to on the 66 from there. Not sure that it will solve the problem you have with it, but it does for another issue I already talked about earlier in the thread.

Because the words Find and Mark mean Find and Mark respectively. They are dedicated buttons. I just tested them both from the Compass page, and they both do the same as if they were pressed in the map screen.

For now, I suspect those won’t be an issue if you start from a screen other than the map display, in which case, the find and mark buttons should have the same function.

Hi, I know this is an old thread, but still high in Google searches related to GGZ file format. Anyway, the four bytes in the .sum file aren’t checked by the GPS, so edit away! Perhaps it is checked, along with the basemap & preloaded map .sum files when the device is started in test mode, so Garmin service can tell the files are corrupt, and then rewrite them if that is the case.

Ok, well open one of your archived tracks from the saved tracks in the menu, go sideways to view the elevation profile for the track, then exit back out with the quit button twice, and see if the unit turns off. Apparently it doesn’t happen for everyone, and it won’t happen if you entered the menu from any screen other than the map screen. I’m not so interested in geocaching, but wonder if the geocache database can simply be copied from a 64st or similar. This will be old, I know, but I’m guessing the preloaded data wouldn’t be tied to a specific unit, and would work.

That explains things. I can’t say I’ve ever set up a route ahead of time for any hike on foot, so wouldn’t know. It was the Oregon 3D view I thought you were talking about, which was actually something I was hoping to see, but I was unaware it had been removed, so I guess there’s no chance of that.

Hi, How do you see the elevation profile of the route ahead of you? The 66 doesn’t have the 3D view that the Oregon has AFAIK. Or are you talking about something else? I don’t see basemap shading on anything because it’s turned off in night view, which I use for everything, otherwise the other menu screens are ghastly.

The Birdseye imagery was downloaded with Basecamp with a 64st connected. The imagery isn’t locked to a device until it’s sent from your PC to a device. The same is stated at the end of this document: https://www8.garmin.com/maps/birdseye/pdfs/BirdseyeUsersGuide_EN.pdf I used previously downloaded data and sent to the 66 from there. It makes no difference though (although I initially thought otherwise) if imagery is enabled or not. The issues with panning a map at low zoom, or this one above happen just the same. If Birdseye imagery isn’t valid for a device (if it were just copied from SD card of another unit), it simply doesn’t work, and you also get a warning of this at startup. For improved sensitivity, and some of it’s inherent quality, in the end, amounts to better accuracy. I’m sure Garmin would if it weren’t for the sacrifice. For GPS, and just about any other sat antenna, they are better in every way. Easy to observe with any GPS module that allows you to switch between multiple antennas.

The bug I’m experiencing with the recording menu, I’ve nailed down to the elevation profile display. When I got it to record a short track, you can also go into saved tracks, and similarly move sideways through some information screens about the track, one of which is an elevation profile. Any playing around in that screen works, but powers off once exiting the menu back to the usual map view.

My 64st and 66st both came preloaded with Top Australia and NZ V5 Lite, which is interesting, because V6 became available some months before the 66 was available. They are both the same file size, and the 64 can find an address with only the V5 lite map enabled (just tried today), where the 66 could not. I haven’t checked the 66 again since address search started working with it. For the 64, it may not go to the actual street address number I specified, but it does display the correct street in a map view.

That video is probably mine. I made a bad call on the QFH antenna early on, but think it was fair, given it’s also the first time Garmin hasn’t specifically used it as a selling point. If it was shown definitely not to have one, I’d have taken it back for a refund for sure. I think one of the videos makes it clear why, and I have other GPS units with exchangeable antennas to compare various antennas for the same GPS device. Just tried again today, and moving the map at low zoom froze it so batteries had to be removed, and going into the recording menu, and moving left to see the altitude profile caused it to power off once that menu was exited (as it always does for me). There’s an error log file in the device’s storage that is appended with errors, but the register values are always all zeros, so I don’t suppose it’s useful debug info to sent to Garmin. Funny enough address search using the “find” button started working, but I don’t know if I did anything differently. Even if I was using the built in lite version topo map with no auto routing, I’d still expect to be able to find an address, and just not be able to route to it. In one case it did work, it did power off while routing to a found address though, or immediately after calculating the route). Totally off topic: A thought occurred to me. E-paper displays! Even if it meant a GPS mapping device was monochrome, wouldn’t E-paper display make the ultimate outdoor GPS?