Hertzog

Yes, the x series works the same way. As cache_r_joe said, on the x models he can also turn on data logging to the SD card; that way he doesn't have to worry about exceeding the 10000 point limit of the regular active track log. As far as I know, there is no way of saving the trip computer data, but it would be nice if there were; I definitely wouldn't want to discourage someone from looking for one

Unfortunately those areas aren't covered on the 24K maps.

I should also mention that the various display fields where "elevation" can be displayed still show the barometric elevation, and on the Altimeter page the elevation displayed at the bottom of the page when the elevation profile is selected is still the barometric elevation; however, the elevation profile shown on the Altimeter page will be the GPS elevation, and if you use the toggle switch to move the cursor on the profile the elevation at the bottom of the page will will switch to the GPS elevation. So viewing the GPS elevation during a flight will still be pretty limited; but at least you can end up with a track log that shows the GPS elevation.

Yes, Location (lat/lon) can be displayed on the wide data field on the map page, as well as the wide fields on the trip computer page; as far as I know, those are the only places you can display it, but I could be wrong.

There was a discussion of this back in October on the 60C_CS Yahoo group. The consensus was that it refers to the ability to display Location (lat/lon) in one of the wide data fields on the Trip Computer page and Location (selected) on the other. Location (lat/lon) remains in ddd mm.mmm, WGS84 format, and Location (selected) is the format and datum you have selected.

As a result of recent threads on altimeter usage on the Garmin GPSr's, I've started running some experiments to get an idea of what exactly is going on. Although I've just started this and have more ideas than answers, I've made one astounding discovery: If you go into the "Fixed Elevation" mode on the 60CSx, it now uses the GPS altitude for tracks and waypoints instead of the barometric altitude!! Garmin has apparently implemented this without bothering to tell us, in spite of numerous threads over the years practically begging them to implement just such a feature! Go figure. I was pretty sure I hadn't seen this in the past; I went back to my 60CS, and it does not do this. I'm not sure I've got the latest software on it, so it could be Garmin has implemented this on the older models as well. This is very preliminary, and I might end up with egg on my face, but it looks very firm to me, and I wanted to get the word out. I urge those who have been interested in this kind of feature in the past to try it for themselves -- particularly if you are flying over the holidays Merry Christmas!

Could your contrast be set to low? I haven't used a Venture CX, but I imagine there is a contrast setting, and you might have accidently adjusted it to a low level.

You are correct. The "Black Bar Lodge" shown is located in Merlin, OR. It shows up as a POI in City Nav. The lodge near the car is a POI on the Garmin TOPO map. For whatever reason, the Topo POI location seems to be about 0.1 mi further north than the actual location of the lodge (you can see the lodge in Google Earth if you know where to look). If he had known about the lodge, though, and tried to make his way there, he would have passed the actual lodge on the road leading to the POI location.

The wording in the manual: "A check mark indicates the map is shown on the Map Page." Is misleading. What it should have said is something like: "A check mark indicates the map will be displayed on the Map Page if the current location of the map display is over the map area, and if all higher ranking maps are hidden." Yes, I know that is pretty confusing too, but the best I can come up with on short notice

There is no "map selection" feature on the 60CSx. Sounds like what you are looking at is the map setup page, which allows you to selectively hide or display various maps; it doesn't move you to a particular map area. In lieu of panning, the best option is to "Find" a POI in the area of interest (a city for example) and select "map" on the the POI page that pops up. That will center the display on that POI.

This is something I've thought a lot about over the last week or so. I have a 60CSx and the various MapSource map products, so my observations are from that perspective. Specifically to the lodge: Black Bar Lodge is listed as a POI on the Garmin Topo, but not on the street mapping products (CN etc), so he would have to have had the topo segment from that particular area loaded to see it. Even then, finding it would have been problematical; he would need to hide any other maps he had loaded and then done a search to find it. One other point about the lodge is that the car was actually about 7 miles from it rather than the originally reported 1 mile; however he probably went by the one mile point as walked back along the road, so could in all probability have gotten to it if he had been aware of it. All of the Garmin mapping products show the maze of logging roads north of the "main" route (Bear Camp Road), so a Garmin handheld with maps of the area loaded would have have been helpful in giving him a better idea of what his situation was. He might have seen the route to the lodge, and if he missed that he might have at least continued on the logging road at the point at which he started down the creek. To "drift" slightly, I think the point where the GPSr with maps loaded might have been most useful would be when they first got off Bear Camp Road; once he suspected he was in trouble he might have looked at it, seen the maze of logging roads that he was entering, and realized the folly of continuing along that way.

Even if he doesn't use the topo maps on the GPS, he might still find them useful on his PC, for planning purposes. I've been trying to convince my brother, who is also a hunter, that he really "needs" a GPSr, but so far he hasn't "seen the light". My nephew (sister's son) who is also a hunter, uses a Rino so he can communicate with his hunting partner. If your father turns out to really like the topos, then consider getting him the 24K maps for his next birthday (more detail than the 100K for the areas they cover). I would let him get familiar with the 60Cx and the 100K maps, then make a decision on the 24K maps based on whether or not they cover the areas he hunts and whether or not he thinks they would be useful.

My only idea is the overvoltage sensors for the 60 models and the 76 models may have come from different production runs and had slightly different threshold levels - enough to trigger or not trigger on the lithium initial voltages. The 60 models were available a little earlier than the 76's, and so might have used an earlier batch of overvoltage sensors. However, if that were the case, one would think that by now both models would have sensors from more than one batch. Still, I've heard many people report problems with the 60's, and have yet to hear a single report of a problem with a 76. Its pretty well established that the firmware is the same for both models, but do we know for sure that the circuitry is the same?

This, plus reports that the 76CSx doesn't have the lithium battery problem, would swing me in favor of the 76CSx if I were buying today. I like the feel and button placement on 60CSx, but I suspect that if I used a 76CSx for a while I would like it just as well.

I think someone once said that the card slot for the 76CSx is more "robust" than the 60CSx, but I haven't seen the 76CSx to know. Although I'm a big 60CSx fan, that might influence my decision today; the card slot is the one thing that I'm uneasy with - I almost lost a 1GB card in the carpet once, and I although I have a card reader on my pc I prefer to leave the card in the GPSr rather than risk taking it out.

Grasscatcher, have you seen the lithium battery shutdown on your 76CSx? So far, the only reports I've seen are for the 60C/CSx. I've been wondering if the 76 series also seen it.

The other thing I would do is set the units side by side and go through all the settings to make sure they are the same. There are many options, and one of several could be causing your problems (datum setting and power saving mode come to mind, but there could be other subtle settings that are messing you up.

As others have indicated, what you are seeing is basically a more conservative estimate of accuracy with the SiRF models. If you want to get a feel for the actual relative accuracies of the two units, just put them both into a 1 second track logging mode and let them sit and track for about an hour, then compare the size of the "blob" of track points. If your experience is like mine, the 60CS spread will be about twice that of the 76CX. By the way - the estimated accuracy calculation doesn't include a map contribution; the map errors are added to the estimated accuracy when calculating the radius of the circle displayed on the map page.

It sounds like you are seeing something like dcha reported in a recent thread: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php...9&hl=cactus For what it's worth, I've been paying attention to Total Ascent and Total Descent on my 60CSx since then, and haven't seen anything similar. All my tests have been with good continuous signal reception though; if you get into conditions of marginal reception during your run, maybe that is causing an error.

As another poster has replied, this is an often requested feature that Garmin has turned a deaf ear to; conceptually, it should be such a simple change too! As to logging the GPS elevation, there is one work-around, but it would be a big hassel: If you don't mind flying with your GPSr connected to a laptop, then you can log the tracks with nRoute; nRoute logs the GPS elevation in place of the barometric. Another quick way of seeing the GPS altitude is to mark a waypoint, then average it; the initial mark of a waypoint records the barometric altitude, but when averaging it uses the GPS altitude. A nice side effect of this is you would then have a record of the location the time of the elevation reading.

What you are seening is normal. The older models look at two at a time (and will use ranging data from them if available). The SiRF models only look at one at a time, and only use the correction information from them.

I did some more testing today, and the interval between dropouts seems to be more a function of the number of trackpoints logged than time. I set the logging rate to 2 seconds, and got an average lost sample interval of 315 samples, or 10.5 minutes; then I set the logging rate to 1 sec and got dropouts at an average of 389 samples, or 6.5 minutes. I had disabled WAAS while I did the 1 second test, so the differences could be due to the change in logging rate or WAAS; also, nRoute was not connected and logging to the data card was enabled. I'll try some more tests varying only one thing at a time. (If I were still working, this would be a good DOE (Design of Experiment) project

I think what you are seeing here is something I encountered a while back, in which if you are tracking in nRoute it very noticeably beeps and announces a lost track about every 5 minutes and starts a new track log. If it's the same problem, then it is happening all the time; it's just that the 60CSx doesn't start a new log each time. What seems to happening is that once every 5 minutes the GPSr drops about 4 seconds of data. To see this set the GPSr to log at 1 second intervals, then let it sit in a good location and track for about 20 minutes or so. Then download the track data and carefully look at the trackpoint intervals; what you should see is a 4 second dropout about every 5 minutes. I think there is some sort of housekeeping task that causes the unit to stop tracking for about 4 seconds; I've acutally been able to watch the satellite page and see it "freeze" during these intervals. I first noticed this in May, then looked back at earlier track data where I happened to log at 1 second intervals. It looked like the dropouts didn't occur before March, but starting in March (following the V2.60 update) I saw dropouts at 10 minute intervals; then in May (following the V2.7/2.4 update) the dropouts went to a 5 minute interval. I may have mentioned this in a thread at the time (circa late May), but I believe my thinking was this was such an esoteric problem (and maybe just one with my unit) that I would wait to see if anyone else has sees the same thing - up to now I haven't seen a mention here or any of the other boards that I monitor.

Given your results, I would say there is still something wrong with the total ascent algorithm. Version 2.7 of the software was supposed to have fixed problems that had been observed, but there was quite a bit of discussion on the forum following the 2.7 release to indicate there were still problems (you can get a feel for it by doing a search on the forum for "total ascent" (with quotes)). I would suggest that you submit a bug report to Garmin on it. Good to see that the 60CSx works so well in the mountains and forests; did you have an external antenna? I was hiking in Canada this summer (without external antenna) in a heavily forested region. I never lost track, but had some wild track excursions going in, probably because it was using reflected signals. Coming out on the same trail it did pretty well. I for one would definitely be interested in seeing your track files.

Thats some hike! I did San Jacinto as a day hike from Idlewild (Humber Park) once, and that was when I was much younger and in a lot better shape! People have reported problems with the total ascent in the past, but I thought it had been corrected in the latest software; perhaps not. For it to work properly you would need to have it on and getting a good track continuously, so that might be your problem. Oops; when I wrote the above I was remembering problems in getting reliable milage readings in the trip computer under marginal track conditions. Since the altimeter is primarily barometer based, I wouldn't think good GPS tracking would be necessary for good altitude readings, but turning it on and off during the hike might have affected the results.