Didjerrydo
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Posts posted by Didjerrydo
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I'll have to check mine to see which chipset it is, since I get good battery life. I left it on over night by accident last night, and it was at 2 bars after around 10 hours (no backlight, of course).
--Marky
Marky, does your barometer log data with the unit off and SAVE ALWAYS chosen? If not then there is a good chance you have the "M". You should set it tonight before bed and check to see if there is any dynamic data in your barometer graph in the a.m. If you see a straight line - no data. My previous units all logged data successfully in the off modus.
You can also watch for the flickering backlight at around 15 minutes after shutdown (with barometer set to log data) and random intervals thereafter. Neither of my pevious units did this.
do you also have the serial number of unit 1+2 ?
I have serial # 169005012, it has "M" chipset, flickers, works right logging pressure with unit off + alarm clock running.
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Apersson in right! The wheel pops off rather easily with a knife blade inserted into the seam. The internal construction has bolstered my view of this switch a little bit. It has a nice seal inside so nothing can get into the electronics. The switch segments (what you feel as a "click") is plastic on plastic, which is why it felt plasticy to me. But the switching part appears to be sturdy. If it ever breaks, pops off or wears out it will only be the cap, which should be an easy and cheap replacement. In other words, the friction is between the cap and the GPS housing and not the actual switch contacts. Good design really! Go ahead and pop the cap off and check it out! Believe me, my heart was pounding too but it comes off rather easily with a little help from a knife.
I would watch what kind of grease you put in there. You don't want to add anything that would eat the plastic, rubber seal, or housing. I would think that a silicone grease (like the spare tubes that come with some water filters) would be a good choice. Not too much though, just enough to thinly coat the plastic.
I can send pictures of the internals of the switch if anyones interested.
You don't even need to use a knife, as a matter of fact, I wouldn't, due to possibly cutting the unit or wheel. Simply clasp it with your fingernails and pull it off. It's easily done and you don't risk damaging the unit.
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.......... I'm guessing that if the Colorado zoomed in as far as the 60CSx people would be happy?
NO,absolutely NOT.........reaching that lofty goal is impossible because opinions are too varied as to what is "perfect", and it is obvious that there are a great number of people that absolutely do not understand the difference between a compass and a bearing pointer (or course pointer option).
........back to the OP's subject...... that "wandering around" is the result of the higher sensitivity chip. (60 & 76 x series also) It's picking up position "noise" that also is reflected in odometer and speed reading "errors". People complain about that too. However, the same people love the way the new units maintain lock under cover.
If you can't understand WHY it's doing WHAT it's doing, and don't like it , then you'll just have to go back to an older unit with the less sensitive chip.
I understand that in the "auto archiving" process, the new Colorado "filters out" that "position noise" or wandering around. However, Note that in this forum, there have already been complaints about that too!
OK, fair enough, that makes sense. That was all I was asking. I didn't realize that there was a trade off there. I suppose that's a good trade if it has to do that. Does this also account for its inability to "average" a waypoint?
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This has been present in my 60Cx as well. When the unit is in poor reception conditions like indoors or under heavy canopy it would be pronounced. My 300 will record this kind of effect, too in those conditions. And no, SA is not back
.Well, what's your take on the maximum 80' zooming in on the Colorado? I can't believe that a new whizz-bang unit has totally taken a step backwards to this level. Seems as though this is really going to be a terrible hinderance when geocaching?
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I'm noticing that the Colorado 300's position seems to wander all over the place when it is left at a stationary position and the map is zoomed in to the 80' scale. This makes me think of the pre-2000 years when "selective availability" was in effect and civilian GPS units gave rather evasive positions due to the DOD scrambling the signals.
Perhaps, if this is inherent in these units themselves and maybe this is why Garmin chose to not let the map scaling be zoomed in any tighter than 80', instead of the 20' scale with previous units? Are owners of earlier units also seeing this wandering or is this unique to the Colorados?
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Talk about hijacking a post...LOL
As a person that works for a high tech company I have some personal experience with product releases. Every company has a roadmap of features for their product line. In cases like the Colorado all of the intended features may not have been implemented at release. Other products may have a full complement of features at release but the implementation may be buggy and require patches.
In the software world you have to differentiate between patches and updates. Patches are generally targeted at fixing functionality that does not work properly. Updates are usually to introduce functionality that was not in the original release. There is sometimes a discussion on whether missing functionality is a bug or a feature but that is another discussion altogether.
For the most part companies do not include certain features with the express intent of changing them later on. Or, as the OP suggested, Pre-Plan Updates. Certain features are often omitted intentionally due to resource constraints and the desire to bring a product to market within a given timeframe. Timing is everything when marketing products and there is an old saying that the first company to market gets 50% marketshare by default.
Because of this companies work really hard to meet schedules and get the units on the street ahead of the competition. Sometimes the quality of the product suffers because of this. Sometimes testing isn't complete or thorough enough to catch all the problems.
Sometimes certain features are enhanced through out the life cycle of the product. For example, the notes feature for geocaches may only allow so many characters at introduction (say 128 characters) and may be upgraded later to accomodate notes of 512 characters. Sometimes these are part of the product roadmap and sometimes they come as suggestions from the user base once the unit is in the field.
Most companies want to get it as close to right from the beginning as any rework of the code or patches will cut into the profit margin of the company. Unfortunately there is another saying in the high tech world and that is "We never have time to do it right but we have plenty of time to do it over." Until customers speak with their dollars companies will continue to produce substandard products.
Thanks, I'm glad that someone reading this topic actually responded intelligently and informatively and acts like an adult!
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My experience with IPX7 and the Colorado...
I was washing the screen with mild soap and water under a light flow of tap water. I was doing this before placing my screen shield over the LCD window. I opened the battery cover afterwards and found water had penetrated into the SD card slot. I ejected the card and found water had almost made it to the contacts.
Anders said that the battery cover has some play. It does, and where I think is the most vulnerable is the SD card slot where it would make sense that if it was just slightly down or not seated correctly water could slip through. The battery cover makes contact with the battery compartment seal shortly after installation but the SD card seal only closes when the cover is fully in place.
IMHO the battery cover implementation is rather poor. It just seems like a poor design overall. Its definately a dirt/sand/water trap and obviously doesn't seal at least part of the time.
I think you nailed it there. The card slot O-ring is the weak link here I believe.
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I just tried mine in a pool. Not any very deep one, but still. Water did enter under the rubber cover, but not inside the battery or card compartments. No difference to the functionality of the unit either.
After looking at mine closely, this is what I'd expect. The areas under the cover that are outside the two areas sealed by the rubber gaskets will get wet, but it shouldn't cause any harm. I think the unit in this case may have been defective, or the back was incorrectly installed (which I doubt though, it doesn't seem possible to me to latch the back without it being in the proper position). I personally think you (the OP) would be doing your customers a disservice telling them that the unit does not meet IPX7. That's just my opinion though.
--Marky
Actually, wheather it meets the IXP7 specs or not isn't what I'm talking about here, it just seems to me that if a unit floods that easily, there's going to be big problems down the line for Garmin.
As far as the back not being fully "seated" I made sure it was fully pushed up onto the unit as far as I could get it prior to my ill-fated demonstration. I can see where if it wasn't, water could get up into the card slot because the O-ring wouldn't be seated around the mouth of the slot. Clamping down the clasp should fully seat this O-ring around this area anyway.
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Didjerrydo, are you going to dunk another one? Because if you are not then I do not see how you can sell them with a clear conscience. If you yourself are not sure about the ipx7 claims then how can you recommend it?
I think I'll just honestly tell customers about this experience and warn them about how easily the unit can be damaged by water. If they are willing to take this risk and be somewhat protective of it, then fine.
In the past, I've always bragged on Garmin's good water resistance. Surely they will rework this unit to correct this issue if they're going to tout it as their super-duper, rough & tough, all round outdoor handheld!
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Yeah...there is a gap in the cover...but did you actually notice where the rubber seal was? Yeah...around the batteries. So the inside cover can fill up and you'll be fine as long as it doesn't get into the battery compartment. Keep the rubber o-ring and inside of the cover clean and free of debris. I wonder about the SD card port tho....hmmm. It is surprising to hear you drowned the unit tho. Did you check the seal. The cover sliding on and off has had me worried about it actually sealing on that rubber o-ring.
I'm also not so sure that some water didn't enter under the rubber upper "deck" because there seemed to be water coming out of that area also, but look at the strange configuration of the area on the back of the body just below the battery compartment. Looks to me like water can get directly into the innards through the cover's latch and these holes!
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While showing a customer in our store a Colorado 300, I did a little demonstration that I've done many times in the past with other Garmin handheld GPS units. We have a small goldfish pond at the front of the store into which I dipped a Colorado 300 about a foot deep for around 10 seconds. I brought the unit out and pushed the power switch to find it totally dead! The screen flickered a few seconds and quit.
Upon removing the back, I found water inside the unit. I removed the batteries and SD card then used a dust removal product to blow out the card slot and battery compartment as thoroughly as I could, but to no avail.
This amazed me to discover that this unit, that is supposed to withstand a 1 meter submersion for 30 minutes, leaked from this quick dunk! Previous models never had a problem with this. As a matter of fact, in dealing with Garmin handhelds for over 15 years, I've never seen a single unit with water damage and we've sold many,many units over the years which have been used very hard. A co-worker here has a 60 CX which mounted on his motorcycle and rides in pouring rain and has never had a problem with water! Upon closer examination, it seems like the opening in the back where the latch engages with the body is the problem. It's wide open for water to enter. This oversight in the unit's design seems unbelievable!
I called Garmin and told them what happened and they said to send it in for replacement, but said that I shouldn't have done this and that the unit should never be submerged whatsoever. Apparently the Colorado units don't have the water resistance, let alone waterproofness ,as stated in the specifications, of other Garmin handhelds. Anyone with a Colorado should be aware of this and realize that the "IXP7" rating apparently doesn't mean much and is certainly not meant to be taken literally!
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I have had my Colorado for almost one day now and I got at least 12 hours with a pair of 2700mAh NiMh Varta batteries. I used it on my way to the office and it stayed on for all day in the office with poor GPS signals. When I got home I switched batteries and then it still was one bar left in the battery indicator. And the GPS did not complain about discharge batteries.
I used the back light as little as possible but were still playing with settings etc during the day.
FYI, I'm still using firmware 2.20.
You know, I actually think that older software version gave better battery life with rechargables than the current version for some reason!
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I have pretty much given up on trying to use any form, or milliamp hour rating, of rechargables in my Colorado 300. It seems that the only battery type worth using is either lithium or primo grade alkalines (Rabbit batteries or Copper Tops). I know Garmin apparently has a lot of tweaking to do concerning power managment on these units, but is anyone getting more than 4 or 5 hours of use from rechargables in thier Colorados?
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At least on my computer, as Map Source builds a very large mapset (3848 maps) for loading into a 4 GB SDHC card, the shown time to load actually gets longer as the percentage complete slowly increases. I am loading this to the card in a card reader, not thru the Colorado itself by the way. This is a combination of City Nav NT plus Topo 2008 maps. Does anyone have an answer for this strange situation? 'Wonder which one is right?
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MBAs run the corporate world and they are only motivated by next quarters results. They don't lose sleep over putting out defective products. I am sure there is some thought to seeing how users use a device and making improvements, but I think most updates are reactionary rather than planned.
Regarding the appropriatess of the nature of my response in Post #6, I see it as no less appropriate than the negative, uninformed drivel immediately above.
Later in the day, most likely this evening, I will post a response germane to my interpretation of the original subject.
What is your point here, simply to make trouble and genetate heated responses? I thought a forum such as this was to help people with problems with GPS units and activities concerning them. Most participants have enough sense to use it for its intended purpose and show courtesy to fellow posters, not pick at their spelling or grammer. If all you are on here for is to irritate other people and cause trouble, why don't you do your thing elsewhere. I'm sure most folks would appreciate that!
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I don't how to respond here. The title itself is a non-sensical, misspelled redundancy. Once we get that parsed out, perhaps I can compose an answer.
So, let's look at it: "....."Pre-planed" in Advance?"
1. I assumed that we are not making a piece of wood flat and that we are dealing with the past tense of the verb "to plan", which is "planned."
2. Let's assume for a minute that there is such a thing as "pre-planned", which there really isn't as described in #3, below, and look at the redundancy. Which redundancy is ""Pre-Planned" in Advance." What's up with that? If it is "pre-planned", how can it not be in advance? If it truly has been "pre-planned", how could it possibly have been planned after the fact. As an obvious redundancy the condition "in Advance" adds nothing whatsover to the context of the title and is totally superfluous.
3. Now, about pre-planned as a combination word, does the addition of the prefix "pre" make any sense in distinction if there is no such thing as "post-planning." Not only is post planning implausible at best, even if possible in a sequence of events, who would admit to having done such. That's tantamount to the drunk telling the cop that he had more than the overwhelmingly admtted to consumption of only two beers. So, having established that there can be no such thing described as "post-planned", then there is nothing to be gained by using the term "pre-planned" as there is no "post-" from which to distinguish just good old, everyday planning.
Now, if somebody could re-title this topic, I might be able to provide an answer.
You sound like a really nice person that I would like to know! I've seen this attitude a lot on this forum. I've never encountered this on any other forum anywhere before. This tells me a lot about several of the participants here!
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Now I have a brand new question to add to this...
Regardless if GPSr is using 1 map set or maximum of 2025 map sets...
will 60CSx perform slower? Slower in as in screen redraw when I am manually moving around the map? Or when it is doing whatever calculation(s) it needs to do?
One thing I really dislike about this handheld is its redraw rate on the screen.
Than again even the Garmin nuvi 200 I bought my brother isn't as fast as some other brand I have tried. Other brand I have tried was Mio Digiwalker C220, C310 and that thing draws the map so smoothly that it looked so smooth............ (thanks to it's 400MHz CPU)
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I have been told by Garmin's tech guys that the size of the map datadase loaded does NOT have any bearing whatsoever on, or slow down the boot up or redraw times of a unit.
And just for everybody's information, I was talking just this morning to Garmin's head handheld tech support guy who told me that the maximum number of maps the Colorados can handle is 4000 by the way.
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From Delorme's posted samples, it looks like Topo can display 50 foot contours. This is the same vertical resolution that the Quad maps display. I don't know how the overall level of detail in Topo 7 compares to the Quad maps, but it appears very similar.
For the record, the contour levels depends upon zoom level and detail setting. At highest detail and close zoom, T7 will display 10 foot contours.
The Topoquads tend to be better for showing water detail that includes streams, ponds, and lakes. On the other side of the coin, they are dated to a degree that the T7 maps usually have more current street data. They complement each other nicely, but I would agree that many people will be entirely satisfied with just the T7 data alone.
Didjerrydo, is this information relevant to your question or have we hijacked your thread? I'm not aware that Garmin has greater 1:24000 coverage in the works, but I'm just an interested GPS user. I would think as a dealer you might have potentially more inside news access than most of us. It seems that those of us happy with Delorme's PN-20/Topo7 offering validate that there is a market niche such as you describe.
No, that's good info to know though, but it does look like Garmin would see the bucks to be made here unless there's some technical issue that keeps them from doing this.
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Topo 7.0 is included with the PN-20 for no additional cost. From Delorme's posted samples, it looks like Topo can display 50 foot contours. This is the same vertical resolution that the Quad maps display. I don't know how the overall level of detail in Topo 7 compares to the Quad maps, but it appears very similar.
The quality and detail of Topo 7 is head and shoulders above anything offered by Garmin, with the exception of some selected national parks. Topo includes superior topographic maps, and full street mapping. Plus, Topo 7 is included with the PN-20 at no additional cost. In other words, if you buy the PN-20, you may not need to buy the Topo Quads.
Delorme is providing far superior mapping capability, plus they are including much of it with the PN-20 at a price point far below Garmin and Magellan. Magellan and Garmin have lost their competitive position for mapping capability, and Delorme is severely undercutting their pricing.
Actually, all USGS 1:24,00 quads if our area (Western, NC) is in either 20' or 40' contour lines.
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After wrestling with the many, many issues that need fixing on the Colorado 300, I began to wonder if Garmin intentionally puts new units out there knowing in advance that they will change certain features and functions at a later pre-determined date? Surely lots of the issues with this unit were pretty obvious and would have been seen by the engineers and tech wizzards that develop these units.
Is there a purpose in doing this or is it just a result of rushing s a product to market half baked?
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Hello.
Since loading map to my 60CSx is very slow due to USB 1.1... I use my memory card reader/writer. It does upload the file very fast but as usual Building map set takes forever.
I decided to see how long it really does take to build map sets.
I am loading a total of 5794 maps (1849.8MB) worth. Now MapSource is building the map set... time shown ? 6 hours 8 minutes !!!
Something wrong here or is this normal ?
How about you?
Any tips and tricks ?
You ain't kidding! As I type this post, my computer is running at crawl speed as I am experimenting with maxing out a 4 GB SDHC card with 4673 maps filling 3.795 GB of it. This is the entire City Nav NT program plus about 80% of Topo 2008. I just wanted to see how this would work. The total time for this to load will be about 30 hours! I am loading this via a card reader since my computer's SD card slot reads/writes only SD and not SDHC. Yeah, this just ain't right somehow.
Thanks.
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I am a Garmin dealer here in Western North Carolina (Asheville area) and there is never a day that passes that someone doesn't ask for a 1:24,000 topographic software to load into their Garmin GPS unit. This area of Pisgah National Forest (which is gorgeous but not a national park) is a great hiking & backpacking area and if Garmin would offer a product loke this it would sell like hot cakes here.
I can't understand, now that their units have higher resolution color displays, faster processors and more memory capacities, why this hasn't happened?
We even brought in a some of the new Magellan Tritons due to the fact that they could utilize the National Geographic 1:24,000 software, but have been rather dissapointed with them. So far, every one we've sold has been returned by very dissasitisfied customers.
Looks to me like Garmin is really missing the boat here by not offering this product. There's many vast tracts of National Forest areas all over the country where folks do outdoor activities that needs better mapping than the 1:24,000 stuff that's not that great to most outdoor enthusiasts who have always used USGS 1:24,00 paper maps. After all, USGS has already done all the hard work for them and it's not even copyrighted!
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I just purchased 8 2900 mAh NiMH batteries from the Battery Barn for my Colorado 300 thinking that since they were 2900 mAh that they'd perform similar to Lithium AA's which are 2900 also. Boy was I dissapointed! These things are good for about 2-4 hours at best. Of course I know that the Colorado's seem th have issues with rechargables but I thought this was a bit ridiculous. The only good thing was they were cheap (about $7.95 for 4). Has anybody else tried these batteries and had any better luck?
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And he was also the starter of that other threadWhy starting a second topic about that ?
Because, it would be interesting to see how many defective Colorado's are out there and hoe widespread this issue is! What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with it is that there is ALREADY a thread about this exact issue.
SEARCH is your friend.
But... I know someone will continue this thread without searching unless there's some handholding involved, so...
This is the clock thread.
If this is the hostile atmosphere of participants in this forum when one only requests a survey of owners out there that might be experiencing this issue, I will bow out as of this post. There's bound to be less agressive users elsewhere!
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Third Colorado 330 Still Having Clock Issues!
in GPS technology and devices
Posted · Edited by Didjerrydo
I posted a topic a few days ago on my Colorado 300's clock failing to continue keeping time when the unit was turned off. Well, I found this issue present on three 300's that we recieved here at the store. All of them had to be returned to Garmin as defective. All these units were low serial # units (16900100-169000600) but all were updated to the current software but still had this issue.
Finally, I acquired a "newer" unit (169005021) which seemed to be OK, as far as its clock function, for several days but this morning when I booted it up it's clock also had dropped 8 hours and 44 minutes overnight!
Is this behavior something that just sporadically happens in any GPS unit? I can't believe I'm seeing this in unit after unit. What could be going on here anyway?
P.S. Oops, sorry I called it a Colorado 330 in the topic title. It won't let me edit the title apparently.