phlatlander

I suggest removing the micro sd card and then do a hard reset. From an older thread: "Turn off the Oregon, press and hold the upper left corner of the screen and power the unit on. You will eventually be asked if you want to reset user data. If you answer "Yes" the unit will be master reset." A "how to" youtube video

Alandb has described what you need to do - exactly. On another forum (POI Factory) there are many threads on this subject and Nuvis. In particular, charlesd45 provides excellent info/advice. Example http://www.poi-factory.com/node/25730 I use my Nuvi 1350 for geocaching (complete with icons and sounds) as well as an Oregon550.

Prior to our trip I spent a couple of months of GoogleEarth research to create a .gpx file of various restaurants and sites, complete with geo-tagged photos - worth the effort.

We used our Oregon550 while in Europe in the fall, on the Danube from Budapest to Nuremburg, then on to Prague. On the flights over, about every hour I would turn on the O550 and hold it against the window until it displayed satellites and a reasonable Lat/Long. When we arrived in Budapest the unit "knew" where we were and worked fine for the next two weeks. I use OpenStreetMaps and they were excellent for walking. Didn't try driving though.

Although I use an Oregon550 I have a Nuvi 1350 which also stores the same geocache files as the 550. Actually the Nuvi does some things better than the O550 as I use GSAK to also create TourGuide files for the geocaches which mean I can get both a visual and aural message when a geocache is within my programmed range. For a Nuvi The later version of Nuvi_GPX_by_CT (GSAK macro)supports different colored text and you can download logs etc. It's been my experience that the differences between (older) Nuvis was screen resolution. I suggest you compare the resolution of your Nuvi with others supported by Nuvi_GPX_by_CT and select the one with similar screen dimensions. The combination of Nuvi and Oregon makes the whole exercise flow better. Couple of pictures from my Nuvi 1350 to better describe what can be done.

At the risk of asking the obvious, do you have a micro-sd card? If so, remove it and reboot the unit.

Or here for maps of almost anywhere. Openstreetmap On a recent Danube rivercruise I used maps from this site downloaded to my Oregon 550 for walking around Budapest, Vienna and Prague. Put in my own geocache file and another for restaurants. Found the Kolkovna restaurant in Prague (Old Town) at night under a cloudy sky - worth the effort. Get your Caribbean geocache queries from geocaching.com. The Nuvi will accept both the map and geocaches but there is a caveat. I have a Nuvi 1350 it will only process 1 additional map. I have about 8 maps on the micro-sd but only 1 (extra) in use at any one time.

Well, I don't know about GPSmap 60Cx as I have an Oregon 550, but... Occasionally my Asus laptop (Windows 7 64bit) will not recognize the gps. When all else fails I remove the micro sd card from the O550, boot the gps, then turn it off. I then plug it into the laptop and then it will (usually) find the O550 and then I can re-install the micro sd. I should mention my laptop will occasionally fail to recognize my Nuvi 1350 so I just keep trying. BTW I have seen the OS message "loading device driver" even though I have been using this laptop/gps configuration since Jan/12. Another thought, when I have a persistent recognition problem I change usb ports as my laptop has 4. Interestingly, Windows 7 assigns different drive letters to the different micro sd cards in the O550 and N1350 even though I have not (yet) plugged them at the same time. Good Luck!

I stand corrected. The latch works. So my little fix only fixed what I had neglected to figure out. The duct tape is no longer required and has been removed. As I recall the card stayed in place for the first couple of battery replacements and then popped out. I must have moved the latch and not noticed the change and incorrectly assumed the latch to be faulty. Thanks Grasscatcher - sharp eyes indeed!

I have to agree with the view that the microsd card latch operaton is faulty. The latch position failed on my unit within a month of purchase. Lucky for me I noticed the microsd flip out when I pulled out the batteries, perhaps too quickly. The latch would set then pop up all the time and I was not in the mood to send it to Garmin and wait indefinitely for a fix or replacement. Fortunately there is a easy and cheap solution. I simply took a 1 inch piece of duct tape, folded it over so there were no sticky bits, and carefully placed it over the latch. I next carefully installed the batteries. But here is the most important step. When you are replacing the batteries, replace them one at at time, that way the duct tape place holder stays in place. No problems since. Sharp eyes will note that the latch is "up" in the left image. I press it down and it flips "up" every time. I have downloaded OpenStreetMaps for ALL of North America, Mexico, and most of Europe on a 4gb microsd.

Oregon 550 purchased in January 2012 to replace an 8yr old Garmin Legend. 1000's of caches (complete with large colored print and 20 logs - thanks to GSAK), about 30 geo-tagged photos, maps of Canada, USA, Mexico, Cuba, Barbados, all of England, North half of Italy, East half of Spain, most of Germany, Austria, Bratislava, Hungary and most of the Czech Replublic. We recently toured several of those countries I kept track of where we were in strange cities, just in case... We even managed to locate a restaurant in Old Town Prague AT NIGHT, not a easy feat in daylight. The unit came with a slick 110/240v charger and decent NiMh batteries. I am quite satisfied with my Garmin gps.

(Canada) I bought a Garmin Oregon 550 this past January and quite like the unit. It has a touchscreen (which is usable in cold weather) and a geotagging camera which is just adequate, but does allow you to know where the pictures were taken. We just returned from a trip down the Danube and I used the 550 quite a lot. It has 4gb micro sd card and using penStreetMaps, I downloaded all of North America, England AND Europe, including detailed maps of Budapest and Prague. Check the prices as sales are coming and the 550 comes bundled with 2NiMh batteries and a slick 110/240 charger.

FWIW, what are you using to load your caches? Occasionally "bad" characters can be in caches. GSAK (for example) has a pretty good filtering process but even then some "stuff" gets through. Oregon 550: I was in Europe recently and had previously loaded a few historical geocaches with considerable description in Czech and English (considerable as in 100+ lines of text). Every time I selected a certain cache and began to scroll down the description the unit froze. I loaded the cache via notepad and by the process of elimination found a questionable line, deleted it, and all was well. Apparently one of the Czech characters would not display correctly so eventually I deleted all the Czech descriptions in several caches, just in case. Mind you, in this case I had created my own gpx file and had not used GSAK. Anyway it sounds like your problem is solved using the replacement technique, a usually reliable method.

with apologies to Alfonso Bedoya ("Treasure of the Sierra Madre") "Compass? I ain't got no compass. I don't need no compass! I don't have to show you any stinkin' compass" I use an Oregon550 for travelling and geocaching and seldom use the compass. I am quite comfortable using lat/long, but each to his own. The E30 would be my choice.

Here at home I use a LaCrosse charger for AA batteries in my O450 & Canon and I only use Eneloop batteries. They all were recently "refreshed". The chargers I referred to were supplied by the manufacturer and were very portable so I took them along.

We recently spent 2 weeks in Europe. Our trip began in Budapest and ended in Prague. My Canon camera and Garmin 550 both use NiMh AA cells my Sony P&S has a proprietary battery. I carried spare batteries for each. Both the Sony & Garmin came with their own 110/220 chargers. I found however, at least while on the riverboat, that the batteries did not fully charge. So my dumb question is: as Europe is 220v, does this affect the charger, meaning does the different amperage cause the 110/220 chargers to shut off early, or is there some other cause or explanation?

About the only way to find these characters is by process of elimination. If you are comfortable using notepad you can process a .gpx file as text and by halfing the entries find the guilty entry. Don't expect to find the bad character or characters, just the bad entry. Sorry I can't give an example but our travelling laptop doesn't have .gpx files on it. We are on the Danube and I recall a Prague geocache caused my O550 problems. I used the above process to find the problem. Cheers from (almost) Salzburg.

I don't have an Etrex 30 (Oregon 550) but I am careful to load ALL geocaches, waypoints and sundry gpx files on the micro sd card, and I never let the batteries get low enough to cause an auto shut off. Fact is I didn't know a gps would do that. One other possibility is corrupt data in one or more geocaches. For an upcoming trip I have been loading geocaches from Europe and one gc from the Czech Republic would cause the unit to freeze and a restart was only possible by pulling out a battery. I only found this out by checking out each of 50 or so geocaches to see how the the Oregon would display the data and of course it would always freeze. By the process of elimination I located the culprit and deleted the data from the gpx file I was creating. I used Notepad to look at the file and this this particular gc had funny characters that apparently when processed, caused the Oregon software to freeze. I don't know if you use GSAK but with that program you can download geocaches and then download them again as waypoints. Mind you, the waypoints have very limited data but at least you have something.

To get rid of each occasion of an unwanted pushpin, press the back arrow in the bottom left hand corner of the screen.

Here in Canada, GPScity.ca sells the O450 for $270Cdn, the O550 sells for $320 O450 = 2 AA batteries (not included) O550 = 2 NiMH AA batteries (included); Charger included This is a slick 110/220 charger with changeable plugs for NA or Europe. Hard to calculate the cost of those items but I think $20-25 would be a reasonable approximation. To my knowledge these units differ only in the camera and case colour; O450 is orange/gray, O550 is black/gray. I bought the O550 in January 2012 mainly for the geotagged photos. The photo quality is ok, not great but the ability to add your own geotagged photos sealed the deal for me. For an upcoming trip to Europe I created created photos from GoogleEarth and added the Lat/Long data. I then downloaded appropriate maps from OpenStreetMaps and here are the results. Using photoviewer Using whereto>photos Although the screen size is 240x400 pixels there are interesting things you can do. Because you drill down and increase the picture size and move around the picture I have downloaded parts of city maps and areas as jpgs. Biggest size so far is 1920x1080 On the left a 553x450 jpg, normal then max increase. On the right a 1920x1080 jpg, normal then max increase Here are a couple of Oregon 550 hand-held shots taken in the fading light. Taken at 6:49 CDT (Winnipeg MB) Taken at 6:53 CDT (Winnipeg MB)

I don't recall which map came with my O550 (Jan12), but I have downloaded and installed at least 8 other maps (including topos for ND and MT) from OpenStreetMaps. All of North America, Mexico and about 1/2 of Europe - all free! OSM

howarthe is correct, recalculating position can take quite a bit of time. In 2009 we went to Italy and then Spain. It took a while for our friend's TomTom to settle down but then it worked great in Italy, Tuscany to be exact. Then we flew to Barcelona where we rented a car to drive about 350m. We started about 6:15 and luckily our westbound journey on the autoroute followed the coastline (so we couldn't get lost) as it took the TomTom at least 45" to determine where we were. After that it was great and took us to a friend's home in the hills near Jalon - in the dark! Gotta love a gps when it works...

We recently had to replace our malfunctioning cellphone and they don't seem to sell simple bluetooth cellphones any more - go figure. Went home with an iPhone4S. Slick device and definitely overkill for a simple cellphone but hey, give it a try anyway. I usually use a Garmin Oregon550 to track my walking hobby (me and the dog) so today I borrowed the iPhone and used the app "RunKeeper" test 1 - forest with medium bush, tall old-growth pine and poplar (aspen). My old Garmin Legend had satellite lock-on problems in this forest. O550 .70 miles iP4S .66 miles test 2 - bald Prairie - no trees O550 .42 miles iP4S .41 miles test 3 - measured 10km on 4 lane highway (signs posted for 10km check) 0550 10.06km (converted from miles) iP4s 10.04km (converted from miles) 2011 Ford Edge 9.9km Edge Nav system 10+km (no tenths available) Seems the iP4s is every bit as accurate as the O550 perhaps even more so as the Garmin has a tendency to add distance when you move around, as when you stop to chat with another dog owner.

I have an Oregon550 and the very 1st thing I did was install a Zagg screen protector ! I didn't do that for my 2yr old Nuvi and it now has several scratches.

NJPugs - I do not claim to be anything other than a rank amateur, but believing a picture is worth a few words at least... GSAK ver 8 Click on Geocaching.com access and you get the following screen (1st image). Click (select) the various geocache search options, then click on Google Map, move the circle to where you want, press "return Coordinates", then OK (2nd image). GSAK automatically retrieves caches within the area you specified - slick. Thanks to Atlat_Cached in post 11 for talking about this excellent feature.