About 5 weeks ago, I purchased a Garmin etrex Vista. Within a couple of days, I had to return it because it started showing the wrong date – out by many years. In all other respects, the unit seemed to be working fine (acquired a satellite fix quickly, compass and barometer work OK, etc).
The faulty unit was replaced with a new Vista unit, which was working fine – until today! Now my new replacement unit is showing exactly the same symptoms. Today (17 November 2007) it is showing the date on the Main menu screen as 02-Oct-66. (There is nothing I can see which shows whether this is 1966 or 2066, but either way, the date is wrong.) It shows the correct time of day, however, and manages to get a satellite fix quickly, even though it appears it believes that it is living 59 years in the future (or possible 41 years in the past.) I have checked that I am running the latest system firmware (version 3.70), and have tried a full hard reset, changed the batteries, etc, but nothing I have tried will correct the date problem.
This makes the unit all but useless for me, as the downloaded track-logs show corrupt time and date stamps. One major consequence of this is that I can’t use the track-logs to geo-reference my digital photographs from my remote site trips, which is one of the main reasons I bought this unit. Interestingly, the downloaded track-log file shows the dates for the latest track-log points as being 24-Aug-30 to 27-Aug-30, whereas the unit itself is currently showing the date as 02-Oct-66!
Another critical issue is that I can’t download track-logs into MapSouce – the MapSource software attempts to download the current track from the unit, but then at the end of the download seems to recognise that the data is corrupt, and rejects the whole track-log.
I have contacted both Garmin Tech Support and the local resller, so far without success. Is there a known PERMANENT fix for this problem?
