gconner

If you have Virtual PC, you should be able to do the update with your Mac. I updated mine using VPC 7.02 on OS X 10.4.3 on a PowerBook. A bit of patience is needed for the update program to recognize the Explorist, but after that everything works great. However, YMMV.

A note to Mac users -- I was able to update my Explorist 500 using Virtual PC 7.02 under Mac OS 10.4.3. It failed to see the explorist the first 5 or 6 times I tried, but once it found it everything went swimmingly. The problem with recognizing the explorist comes down to (I think) a timing issue between VPC grabbing the USB port from OS X and the updater doing a hardware scan (which seems to cause VPC to drop the port and then regrab it). Anyway, a big YIPEE here! I wish Lowrance and Garmin made their gpsr software as Mac friendly as Magellan.

D0T-C0M, Your points are well taken. My sense of optimism comes from the fact that Magellan (in the past) has been a well respected manufacturer of consumer and commercial grade GPSr's and it doesn't seem that they are planning on leaving the consumer market. I assume they realize that if they don't fix the most serious problems with the Explorist line then the Magellan name will remain "mud" for quite some time. Also, if they are having as much warranty and retail return troubles as it appears then it is costing them a lot of money and possibly retailers. I'm surprised that they haven't come out with at least an interim fix by now since the Xmas shopping season will officially start in the morning. My worry is that, for some reason, there are serious hardware problems with a large number of Explorists that cannot be fixed by a simple firmware revision. If this is the case, will they be willing to replace a large number of older units with newer revised units under warranty?

It seems to me that we *are* getting info from Magellan. They are keeping lists of bugs, and have let you see the list and furthermore have shown you what progress they have made in "closing" bugs. Come on, do you seriously think they would "close" a bug without fixing it? If they thought it was a silly issue or one that wasn't worth fixing they probably wouldn't have put it on the list in the first place, much less assigned it to be fixed. As a friend of mine would say "What do you want, eggs in your beer?" My guess is that Magellan doesn't want to be patching firmware every month, but would rather do it once a year or less. This means they have to be very very careful to test every patch they produce and be moderately picky in those problems they choose to address. For instance, in the case of the 600 there is a possibilty that there is a real hardware flaw and that the only way to keep it from crashing is to give the user the ability to disable some of the features. That would suck, but not suck as badly as having a crashing GPSr. All of us who use Windows know about software patches that cause many more problems than they fix. Personally, I'm willing to be patient, and will be satisfied as long as the promised firmware update comes within the next few months and is rock-solid. If it has the laundry list of improvements and features we've been asking for I will be ecstatic (for at least 10 minutes anyway). However, I will be perfectly happy if the features that the unit already has are fixed to work reasonably well and the poor souls who bought a 600 (I have a 500) are taken care of. Unlike some of you, my unit works well (if not a bit strangely), but I definitely feel for those whose unit crashes or gets corrupted. Being appreciative to the kind folks at Magellan who visit this forum and give us "inside" info would seem to be a good idea. The fact that at least two different people with connections to Magellan have not only visited this forum, and have posted, but have furthermore given us progress reports gives me confidence that Magellan really does care about its customers. For contrast consider Apple Computer. Apple is well-known for fixing bugs quickly and having awesome customer support. However, I'll tell you what, try to find out what bugs Apple is currently working on in OS X, try to see if your favorite bug has been assigned to an engineer or will be "closed" in the next update. You won't be happy with the answer you get -- which is no answer at all. You just have to wait and see. In contrast, it seems that Magellan is doing pretty well, they are just being a bit pokey (in my humble opinion).

Hi, I have 1 more bug and one work-around for the last bug I mentioned. There is some weirdness when working with maps created with Topo 3D and street names. The problem is that (I think) there are two kinds of spaces, only one of which can be typed on the unit. Here is the situation. I have a map of the western states including Utah ( maximum size ~ 240 MB). If I search for Industrial C (the name of the street is Industrial Circle) I get a short list of streets not containing Industrial Circle. But seaching for Indu and scrolling down finds it. However if you keep scrolling you notice that there is a second separate alphabetical list of things starting with Industrial which begins at the end of the first. This is where I was looking in the list when I typed Industrial C. After some playing around it became evident that the key issue was whether or not I put in a space after Industrial. If no, I got the whole list, if yes I got the partial secondary list. Since all of the street names have a space in them, my guess is that there are two different kinds of space. One that the explorist types with the space bar and another that comes earlier in the ascii (or unicode or whatever) character set that the unit cannot type. Anyway, after figuring this out, its not so bad, but makes me scroll alot. BTW, there is also a W Industrial Circle which I tried to find -- entering W Ind doesn't work either, it puts me in the second shorter list. It was pointed out to me by a kind forum reader (! this forum is really great ! ) that there is a work around for the bug I mentioned previously concerning choosing a cache from the map screen. If one zooms in close enough so that a cache icon is the default choice then clicking on it and choosing goto has the expected behaviour. It's a bit time consuming to zoom all the way in on a cache icon but faster than going through the menu system. Best, gconner

Tadpole and all, Here's another "bug" I found just today. If you are on the map and click on a geocache icon, select it from the generated list, and then (while you are on the geocache description page) click <goto>, it *does not goto the geocache*. It instead wants to goto the cursor position, which may be quite a distance from the actual cache. I say that this is a bug because it is a completely different behaviour than when you get to the geocache description page by pressing <menu> then selecting "pts of interest" and then selecting the geocache from the list. In this case pressing <goto> has the expected behaviour of doing a goto to the cache. My reading was about 50 feet off on a cache this afternoon and my friend (with an Etrex) went right to it. When we did actual coordinate readings my explorist was exactly dead on. Why was the compass page wrong but the reading correct? Well that was because I had chosen the POI off of the screen by clicking on it, selected it from the list, and when on its description page, clicked <goto>. I hadn't noticed that I had "goneto" the middle of a parking lot 50 feet away. One real annoyance here is that to actually goto a geocache you find on the screen you need to leave its description page, and remembering its name, select it through the menu system. This can be quite tedious if the cursor is far away from the current position -- one might have to scroll through quite a long list of caches to find it. This is totally different than other POIs which, when you select them from the screen, have a goto button on their description page. In conclusion this is a "bug" for three reasons. It is unexpected behaviour, it is behaviour that makes it quite difficult to accomplish a task that comes up quite often, and it is behaviour that is inconsistent with behaviour of parallel objects on the same device. I'm not sure to whom at Thales to forward this. Feel free to forward it to them if you know how. Best, Greg Conner

Embra, EScout, D0T-C0M and Tadpole, Thanks for the encouragement. Embra, you are perfectly correct about the battery price. About two weeks ago, when I bought the unit, all I could find were offers for $.99 with $14.95 shipping (so $20 was $16 rounded up). However, immediately after your comment I went on eBay and purchased two for $18.95 (shipping included). You you were right, about $9.50 per battery when bought in quantities of two. I will be looking into the swivel mount, do you have a link to a vendor with a good price? EScout, you are right about the power being AMPS* VOLTS. However, my point (which I failed to make) was that if Lowrance was rating the iFinder at 12 hours battery life with normal alkalines then with 2500 mAh NiMH bats it would last a lot longer than the 17 hours which Thales claiming for the Explorist. Similarly with the Garmin (only the numbers will be larger). The other issue, which I again failed to explicitly state, is that I can buy 8 2500mAh NiMH batteries at Wal-Mart for $19. Four complete sets of batteries for $20 good deal. Now I don't know much about bleed-down, or battery memory, or duty cycles of batteries so the Li-Ion may still be more than worth the price. CaStarman, I'm not sure what you mean about the elevation not changing unless you set a waypoint. My Explorist 500 keeps track of the current elevation in the current track, on the location screen and on the two customizable (if you so choose). Go to the elevation profile screen to get the elevation info you ar looking for. As for battery life, I'm wondering if you are making sure that the backlight is set to "low". If so, only 11 hours of battery life would cause me to start a warranty request for a new battery. As for locking, I get a 3D lock *in my house* in about 40 seconds. I just checked it on a "warm" restart. After turning off to back on I got a 20 foot 3D lock in 18 seconds. Maybe my unit is weird. Now on a cold restart *in my house*, I've had it take quite a bit longer (say a minute and a half) to get a 3D lock but never 4 minutes -- that would definitely have me jumping up and down. It's a bit quicker to lock outside, but not that much. Now if you are deep in a canyon and under some trees (like I was yesterday) and turned the unit on for the first time in a few days and it was searching (in the wrong place) for satellites, I can imagine it might take awhile. In that case I would do a restart to speed things up. I guess I don't understand why you need a piece of paper, maybe you don't like the compass screen? Best, gconner

Hi, Here is my review of the Explorist 500 and some comparisons with other GPS units. If this is considered offtopic I will be happy to move it. I bought the Explorist 500 a week and a half ago and it seems to be working almost perfectly. I say almost because when I mark a POI with the cursor the altitude gets set to the current altitude rather than the altitude on the topo map. Other than that I have no issues with it and am quite impressed by its accuracy. In the last month I've purchased a Garmin Legend, a Lowrance iFinder Pro and an Explorist 500. I returned both the Legend and the iFinder Pro because I was not satified by their spotty accuracy and difficulty in getting WAAS locks. I wasn't happy with not being able to return to within 30 feet of the rosebush in my front yard with either the Legend or the iFinder Pro and having them point in the wrong direction half of the time. In my mind, all the features in the world don't make up for lack of accuracy in a GPS. In contrast, the Explorist is very accurate ( I can often return to a marked POI a day later and have the reading be only 3 or 4 feet off instead of 20 to 40 feet with the Legend or the iFinder Pro). The directional arrow on the Legend and iFinder Pro would start randomly wandering when I got within 20 feet of a waypoint (or POI in Magellan-speak), not so with the Explorist until you are within a few feet. Furthermore, instead of occasionally showing me that I'm driving a half of a mile off the highway (and from where I was when driving the other direction on the same highway) like the Legend or iFinder Pro, the Explorist is dead on or nearly so. Instead of my tracks having occasional large random jags in them while hiking under tree cover like the Legend or iFinder Pro, the Explorist shows me not only where I've actually been, but is accurate enough to tell me which side of a street I'm walking on (when using the Topo USA 3D map). The iFinder Pro got a WAAS lock twice for about one minute during an entire week of use and often both the Legend and the iFinder Pro could not get reported accuracy better than 80 or 100 feet when walking whereas the explorist is usually between 10 and 30 feet and has a WAAS lock most of the time when I'm out of doors (I'm in Utah so the WAAS satellites aren't always visible). When driving the Explorist usually reports 30 to 70 feet accuracy, the Legend was a bit worse but occasionally lost signal altogether and the iFinder Pro usually reported between 80 to 800 feet. I know, I know the reported accuracy doesn't mean a whole lot, but losing a signal is bad, and reporting 800 foot accuracy doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I haven't had any of the reported problems with maps or POI files becoming unusable or locking up the gps unit. I do have two large (about 240 megabyte each) topo maps loaded on a 1gb SD card. However, since I've only had the unit a week and a half I might be changing my tune on that any day now. Battery life seems so, so -- not as good as the Legend and nowhere near as good as the iFinder Pro, but passable. With the other two I could use two 2500 mah AA-batteries whereas I'm stuck with the 1300 mah li-ion battery in the Explorist. Extra batteries for the other two are cheap, but will cost me about $20 for a 1100 mah cell phone battery that reportedly works decently for the Explorist. Featurewise the Legend was hands down the best, with an extremely usable interface and tons of features and options on the screens, the iFinder Pro was not as good but still very good. I would say the Explorist is just passable with just what you need, but no more. However, one nifty feature that it has that the other two don't is the ability to show an altitude plot of a track or route. Searching for POI's on the Explorist is a real PITA unless I'm just totally missing something. How am I supposed to know if something I'm looking for on the topo map is an "area" or a "locale"? Its just plain weird that I can't search for a place name without knowing what random category Magellan has put it in. The iFinder Pro was clunky but I was able to figure out how to use it in about 3 tries. The Legend search just worked the first time I tried it. Returning on a track took about 4 hikes to figure out on the iFinder Pro, talk about a weird interface. Every time you backtrack it makes a route (but doesn't tell you about that) reverses it and puts you on it. The upshot is that eventually you have dozens of routes in your route file, some of them having the same name. Finally the iFinder Pro doesn't store altitude data in its track files. Both the Legend and Explorist are much much better at backtracking a track. The Legend is more flexible in that it asks whether you want the whole track or some portion of it (like since you've turned it on the last time, or the last day's worth of track). I think the Explorist is more straightforward to use when backtracking, but this takes several more key presses to accomplish than with the Legend. However, as noted above, my tracks are much much more accurate with the Explorist that either of the other two. When I rehike a trail, my tracks are either on top of each other or nearly so with the Explorist, whereas they wandered quite a bit with the iFinder Pro and Legend. All three screens are very good in their own ways: the Legend has really great resolution, the iFinder Pro is very big and the Explorist is color, and easier to read in the daylight. I would pick the Explorist first, then the iFinder Pro with the Legend last since the text, while clear, is just too small to read when you are hiking or driving. The color screen of the Explorist makes all the difference when all you can spare is a quick glance at the screen. The iFinder Pro is really too big to be considered "pocketable" and isn't set up to be used with one hand. Both the Legend and the Explorist are pocket sized and are easy to use with one hand. The Legend might be a bit hard for a lefty to use one-handed, the Explorist is pretty symmetric. Both the Explorist and iFinder Pro have a SD slot. Both are a PITA to get to. The only way to access the iFinder Pro SD card with a computer is to take it out. The Explorist has a USB interface that plugs in to a computer and allows you to see both the internal and SD memory as external flash drives (but not simultaneously). The Legend has only a clunky serial interface, bleah. The file system on the Explorist is very flexible allowing one to be able to categorize maps, tracks , POIs etc. Furthermore, unlike the iFinder Pro, one can choose which POIs are shown. With the iFinder Pro after you pull in a file of waypoints from the SD card I see no way to "unload" them. I was able to use both the Explorist software with my Mac. In fact, I can run the Mapsend Topo USA 3D using Virutal PC with no problems (except I don't get the 3D view on the Mac since VPC doesn't support Direct3D). I can create maps, send them to the Explorist, transfer POI's, routes and tracks with ease using my Mac. However I've heard the NMEA works on the Mac with the Legend and the iFinder Pro, but I haven't had any luck with the Explorist. On the other hand, I could just buy a $60 dedicated gps reciever for my laptop so I'm not too concerned about that. I didn't try the addon maps of either the Legend or iFinder Pro, but I will say that the Mapsend Topo USA 3D map I bought for the Explorist is fantastic. It's accurate and has every place that I can think of listed on the map. Summer chlldrens camps, ravines, springs, trail heads (though not marked as such) are all there as are flats, ponds and just about any describable physical land feature or named place is on there, exactly where it is supposed to be. Topo lines are plentiful and accurate. Roads and addresses seem to all be there and are accurate. However things like restaurants are hilariously out of date. Some of the info is at least five years old. It only has about 2/3 of the gas stations. Cloverleafs, over/underpasses and other complicated intersections are reproduced in exquisite detail on the map. Believe you me, there are some doozies in Salt Lake (where they used the "plan it while you build it" scheme to finish the freeway before the 2002 Winter Olympics) and the ones I tried were all exact -- my position was shown accurately on the cloverleaf while moving. New subdivisions with roads but no houses seem to be reproduced faithfully also. Its funny that some parts of this map are so much more up-to-date than others. There is a routable street map available for the Explorist, but not for the Legend or the iFinder. My family took the Explorist geocaching and it worked very well -- we found the first 3 we looked for. It's dedicated geocaching features are nice but leave lots of room for improvement. No editing geocaches, no descriptions, hints limited to 50 characters, no place for cache size are a few of its shortcomings. Here are some features/fixes that would improve the Explorist: 0) Fix the altitude bug with cursor marked POI's. 1) The ability to turn the backlight completely off (it doesn't need to be on when I'm not looking at it). Heck I would mind even turning the screen itself off just so long as the unit keeps recording my track data. 2) Make the search feature more intuitive and get rid of all of the stupid categories on the topo map ( how often will I be looking for an "arroyo" for goodness sake?) 3) One more user screen with user selectable fields. 4) Make it possible to measure the distance between two points neither of which are the current position. 5) Change the interface so that hitting "mark" twice marks a POI (waypoint). Right now its mark, enter, enter. 6) Show the upcoming part of a route or track on the compass screen. 7) Be able to turn portions of a track in to a route instead of the entire track. 8) Be able to edit the color/pattern of a route or a track. 9) Improve the geocaching features. Allow geocache editing. Include the full description field (I have lots of space on my 1gb SD card) and hint field. Include fields for all of the standard fields on geocaching.com (such as cache size). Allow me to mark a cache "found" or "mine". Allow me to choose which caches are listed or shown on the map depending on these fields (like a pocketquery). Hope you find this interesting, Gconner