sleddogs2

Good luck with Triton. All I can say is RUN from Magellan. I can't belive the company that had such a pioneering lead in hand held GPS has fallen to worst of class. I have owned 6 magellans. from merideans, explorists 500 and XL, roadmate, and my latest Triton 500. I must say the Triton, Vantaqe Point, and their convoluted approach to propriatary and S/N encripted maps and software make this product such a pain that I stopped using it. I am afraid to even sell it at a garage sale as someone will ask me to get it set up. Follows is an excerpt from a letter I sent to every magellan email contact i could find on their web site. Not one response. Not even an acknologement. Magellan ??? Run away !! Memo to Magellan ...I upgraded again to a Triton 500, Vantage Point, Accuterra Great lakes map and National Geographic TOPO! I guess I expected an upgrade not a severe backward step!!! After a number of months trying to get used to the new products let me share my list of mistakes your design team has made with the new line. Multiple Geocaching tries and a solid week of using it while hunting this fall has left me frustrated. I honestly believe your development people have not even personally attempted to use the product in the way customers would use it or they would have discovered at least a few of the following significant flaws. Triton 500 - Most outdoors persons do occasionally wear gloves. Did you ever think about that when you made the buttons so small and hard to push that they are near impossible to use. The power and light buttons are impossible to press even with thin gloves on. When below 0 degrees F, the rubber over molding is so stiff you can hardly press it in at all. By the way I could operate my Explorist 500 with snowmobile gloves on at – 20 F. -The Joystick is horrible. It is so tiny that a center push is tough to feel differently from a push on the outside ring. Unless you use your thumb nail you can’t work it accurately. With gloves, impossible. - Menus.”‘We don’t need no stinking menus”. This must have been a design objective. What were you thinking? You took a well organized series of menus that you could easily go into and back out of and scattered them about many different screens. On some screens the menu changes if you are navigating or not. Many menu items are missing from the past entirely. Some menus you get to by pressing the page button. Hint, save the memory space for fancy menu graphics and give us a real and logical menu system. - Battery Life. Horrible for all kinds. I have tried alkaline, lithium AA’s, and rechargeable NmHi. 4 hrs at best and worse yet when cold. - Electronic Compass. It has never been accurate. 90 degree off or more is common and inconsistent with every use. I have recalibrated while hunting so many times I have resorted to once again carrying a $5.99 magnetic compass. - Altimeter and barometer are a nice touch but even the old Meridian had a trend graph. Just a number here doesn’t help much unless you have hidden a pencil and note pad on the Triton somewhere that I haven’t found yet. - Size matters. Last I have heard, electronics were getting smaller. So why is your newest larger and heavier than the Explorist it replaced. My Blackberry with free GPS map and Geocaching should be more like it. - 100’ smallest zoom scale. In the days of WAAS and excellent repeatability, having only a 100’ maximum zoom makes this a poor GPS for Geocaching. - SD card. Great idea for memory but not having a open file structure for .gpx or even old Explorist formats or map send file versions makes the functionality absurd. If you had the best software of the class you might take a proprietary position but you are not an I Pod. It is bad enough that your schemes to protect your maps make functionality for multiple device people a pain. Now, we must go thru multiple software steps and migrations to even get old way points and geocaches loaded. After finally getting old waypoints loaded, I find out that Windows can’t see or use them on the SD card. What were you thinking? - USB cord. It is a good thing it is easier to connect as it is the only way to interface with the unit. Using the marvelous new web based tool Vantage Point is a special experience. Let me share. Vantage Point - There is so much missing here that it is nearly an impractical tool to use. Unfortunately you made the new Triton devices not compatible backwards to use Map Send products. - Using Vantage point with my Explorist 500 actually somehow deactivated previous maps from Map Send Topo 3D. Map Send S/N protection logic said I could not load maps to a new device. I tried to solve this problem long ago with your customer non-service and that was an unresolved issue. I learned from a GPS sharing site to just give up. Your team’s recommendation was to buy a new Accuterra map. Kind of sneaky. Plug in and oops, you must now spend money on an upgrade. So, now I had to buy a Accuterra map for my new Triton and my old Explorist. I will not connect my other 2 Explorists for fear they will lose map functionality as well. That makes them now somewhat useless then as well. - I have spent hours trying to get tracks from the GPS onto the new software tool. I guess you didn’t suspect that users might want to print them? Save them? Manipulate them?... I couldn’t even figure a way to get a data file to load into a mapping program like Topo USA or even to migrate backwards to Map Send. - I have downloaded all the updates so far. The web based tool to do this is a great idea. As far as using windows standard looking and intuitive menus, well you missed here almost as bad as with the Triton itself. Library, Journal, Connect, when even well experienced GPS users don’t know what they mean I guess we can at least give you creativity points. - How about a simple fix. Update Vantage point to the old the Map Send functionality and tools and guess what, problem solved. Accuterra - I would have expected a topo map that cost $69 to download would have a little more detail and topo data. The elevation lines are so far apart that I thought it wasn’t a topo map when I looked at it. - Some road names are missing. Topo detail like shading, swaps, etc is missing. Lake shoreline accuracy and detail is poor. - After a number of times of trying to contacting your customer service via the web, I had to eventually contact Accuterra company (your supplier) to get your customer service to fix a bug that removed water from the map when zoomed in. This made the 2 versions I had purchased for my Triton 500 and Explorist 500 useless. When you finally fixed it I re-downloaded it. Once again your copy protection schemes made this a many hour exercise. - While I soon recognized that Accuterra maps were marginal at best, I liked the idea of the interface with National Geographic detail maps. Or so I thought. National Geographic TOPO! - While not your product, they are obviously new at this too. Their interface to your GPS product is almost as bad as your Vantage Point. At least the latest update made the map transfer several steps easier. - It seems as though every time I have opened TOPO! A new update was available. While I am glad they are fixing the deficiencies, their readiness and your readiness to launch was poor. - National Geographic is always known for the highest quality maps. Why then are scanned image maps of so poor quality when downloaded to the Triton. Both Topo and aerial views are barely legible at 300’ scale. Zooming in further the map disappears. Detail topo maps that you can’t zoom in close are useless. Good luck with Triton. I just purchased a Delorme PN40

All I can say is RUN from Magellan. I can't belive the company that had such a pioneering lead in hand held GPS has fallen to worst of class. I have owned 6 magellans. from merideans, explorists roadmate, and my latest Triton 500. I must say the Triton, Vantaqe Point, and their convoluted approach to propriatary and S/N encripted maps and software make this product such a pain that I stopped using it. Follows is an excerpt from a letter I sent to every magellan email contact i could find on their web site. Not one response. Not even an acknologement. Magellan ??? Run away !! Memo to Magellan ...I upgraded again to a Triton 500, Vantage Point, Accuterra Great lakes map and National Geographic TOPO! I guess I expected an upgrade not a severe backward step!!! After a number of months trying to get used to the new products let me share my list of mistakes your design team has made with the new line. Multiple Geocaching tries and a solid week of using it while hunting this fall has left me frustrated. I honestly believe your development people have not even personally attempted to use the product in the way customers would use it or they would have discovered at least a few of the following significant flaws. Triton 500 - Most outdoors persons do occasionally wear gloves. Did you ever think about that when you made the buttons so small and hard to push that they are near impossible to use. The power and light buttons are impossible to press even with thin gloves on. When below 0 degrees F, the rubber over molding is so stiff you can hardly press it in at all. By the way I could operate my Explorist 500 with snowmobile gloves on at – 20 F. -The Joystick i s horrible. It is so tiny that a center push is tough to feel differently from a push on the outside ring. Unless you use your thumb nail you can’t work it accurately. With gloves, impossible. - Menus.”‘We don’t need no stinking menus”. This must have been a design objective. What were you thinking? You took a well organized series of menus that you could easily go into and back out of and scattered them about many different screens. On some screens the menu changes if you are navigating or not. Many menu items are missing from the past entirely. Some menus you get to by pressing the page button. Hint, save the memory space for fancy menu graphics and give us a real and logical menu system. - Battery Life. Horrible for all kinds. I have tried alkaline, lithium AA’s, and rechargeable NmHi. 4 hrs at best and worse yet when cold. - Electronic Compass. It has never been accurate. 90 degree off or more is common and inconsistent with every use. I have recalibrated while hunting so many times I have resorted to once again carrying a $5.99 magnetic compass. - Altimeter and barometer are a nice touch but even the old Meridian had a trend graph. Just a number here doesn’t help much unless you have hidden a pencil and note pad on the Triton somewhere that I haven’t found yet. - Size matters. Last I have heard, electronics were getting smaller. So why is your newest larger and heavier than the Explorist it replaced. My Blackberry with free GPS map and Geocaching should be more like it. - 100’ smallest zoom scale. In the days of WAAS and excellent repeatability, having only a 100’ maximum zoom makes this a poor GPS for Geocaching. - SD card. Great idea for memory but not having a open file structure for .gpx or even old Explorist formats or map send file versions makes the functionality absurd. If you had the best software of the class you might take a proprietary position but you are not an I Pod. It is bad enough that your schemes to protect your maps make functionality for multiple device people a pain. Now, we must go thru multiple software steps and migrations to even get old way points and geocaches loaded. After finally getting old waypoints loaded, I find out that Windows can’t see or use them on the SD card. What were you thinking? - USB cord. It is a good thing it is easier to connect as it is the only way to interface with the unit. Using the marvelous new web based tool Vantage Point is a special experience. Let me share. Vantage Point - There is so much missing here that it is nearly an impractical tool to use. Unfortunately you made the new Triton devices not compatible backwards to use Map Send products. - Using Vantage point with my Explorist 500 actually somehow deactivated previous maps from Map Send Topo 3D. Map Send S/N protection logic said I could not load maps to a new device. I tried to solve this problem long ago with your customer non-service and that was an unresolved issue. I learned from a GPS sharing site to just give up. Your team’s recommendation was to buy a new Accuterra map. Kind of sneaky. Plug in and oops, you must now spend money on an upgrade. So, now I had to buy a Accuterra map for my new Triton and my old Explorist. I will not connect my other 2 Explorists for fear they will lose map functionality as well. That makes them now somewhat useless then as well. - I have spent hours trying to get tracks from the GPS onto the new software tool. I guess you didn’t suspect that users might want to print them? Save them? Manipulate them?... I couldn’t even figure a way to get a data file to load into a mapping program like Topo USA or even to migrate backwards to Map Send. - I have downloaded all the updates so far. The web based tool to do this is a great idea. As far as using windows standard looking and intuitive menus, well you missed here almost as bad as with the Triton itself. Library, Journal, Connect, when even well experienced GPS users don’t know what they mean I guess we can at least give you creativity points. - How about a simple fix. Update Vantage point to the old the Map Send functionality and tools and guess what, problem solved. Accuterra - I would have expected a topo map that cost $69 to download would have a little more detail and topo data. The elevation lines are so far apart that I thought it wasn’t a topo map when I looked at it. - Some road names are missing. Topo detail like shading, swaps, etc is missing. Lake shoreline accuracy and detail is poor. - After a number of times of trying to contacting your customer service via the web, I had to eventually contact Accuterra company (your supplier) to get your customer service to fix a bug that removed water from the map when zoomed in. This made the 2 versions I had purchased for my Triton 500 and Explorist 500 useless. When you finally fixed it I re-downloaded it. Once again your copy protection schemes made this a many hour exercise. - While I soon recognized that Accuterra maps were marginal at best, I liked the idea of the interface with National Geographic detail maps. Or so I thought. National Geographic TOPO! - While not your product, they are obviously new at this too. Their interface to your GPS product is almost as bad as your Vantage Point. At least the latest update made the map transfer several steps easier. - It seems as though every time I have opened TOPO! A new update was available. While I am glad they are fixing the deficiencies, their readiness and your readiness to launch was poor. - National Geographic is always known for the highest quality maps. Why then are scanned image maps of so poor quality when downloaded to the Triton. Both Topo and aerial views are barely legible at 300’ scale. Zooming in further the map disappears. Detail topo maps that you can’t zoom in close are useless. Good luck with Triton. I just purchased a Delorme PN40

I'm an avid snowmobiler in Northern WI and the UP of MI. Many caches I tried for in the winter near the trails ended up too far from the trail to bother walking through waist deep snow or they were really buried. So I launched a few of my own this summer and tied a camo rope quite high in a tree leading to the cache even if it was buried in snow. It is largely invisible unless you have you geocaching eyes on. Enjoy the winter. sleddogs2

Search the forums here or GpsPasSion.com early releases of ver 1.0 had a defect. I cantacted Magellen and the replaced it. That was a year ago so you must have a real old one.