LostNfound

I truly can't explain why one Garmin unit like the 76c would be so much closer in accuracy to a known benchmark or to a surveyor's point than a Garmin 60cx. That boggles me. I would assume that manufactures would use similiar algorythms across their product lines and therefore would have consistent results. But I know from games we have played at Georgia Geocacher's Association meetings that thirty five people with all kinds of makes and models of GPSRs come up with radically different locations if given the same coordinates. Throw in tree cover and the odds get worse. When the point is in an open field with good view of the horizon the vast majority of the units are within the 3 meter circle but I have seen a few that had low epe's that calculated the coordinates to be at least 20 feet away from the others. I did have a personal observation on Saturday. I was caching in downtown Atlanta and consistently found that several caches were twenty to thirty feet off the mark. I didn't think much about it because as a cacher you never know just how diligent the placer was in obtaining good coordinates. Did they leave the gpsr in the spot for five minutes or 5 seconds before recording the coordinates? Do they know which end of the gpsr to hold and which way their antenna is biased towards (level or pointed up)? Did tall buildings reflect signal? That night I stumbled up the Coast Guard site that is responsible for civillian use of gpsr's and found a US map that had a blue shaded area directly over Georgia and Alabama. It was really hard to understand what the map meant but it seemed to indicate that the government believed that readings in this geographic area would be affected by a service problem. I was tired and didn't spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. IF you understand what I was looking at please feel free to post an explanation. I would love to read it. I would prefer to hear from somebody that actually understands and not some 18 year old who just likes to see his posts on this board. No offense to any rocket scientist 18 year olds but we have all seen that posted response to a serious question that just screams "Hey I don't have a clue but I'm going to offer my 2 cents." My basic questions would be 1) how often are we as users of gpsr's subjected to service outages from a satellite or two and then blame the unit for being inaccurate? (fyi: anything under 3 meters in my book is dead on) and 2) why do two units often show radically different results?

FIRST as a Magellan Meridian Gold owner since June of 2001 I have to say a HUGE thank you to Skramblr. For three years I enjoyed reading my daily dose of "how to own a Meridian" in the Yahoo user groups. I also relied upon his web page to get good information about the Magellans. Some of you may not realize that Skramblr spent thousands of hours moderating this group and becoming a self taught expert of a product that he truly enjoyed. For years I too loved my Meridian Gold and proudly wore my Magellan baseball cap that I won at a Georgia Geocacher's Association meeting. Unfortunately everything Skramblr, RobertLipe and many others said is true. Magellan just doesn't give a d*mn about their loyal owners. At one time they may have. Robert said it best in an e-mail exchange we had together. "It isn't just one thing but rather a death by a thousand paper cuts." I still have my Meridian Gold but haven't put a battery in it since purchasing my Garmin 60csx last month. Is my Garmin perfect? NO!!!!! Do I have a reasonable expectation that after a few more firmware releases they will answer many of the "requested changes". Yes. I quit believing a long time ago that Thales was even listening. I hate thinking that because I also believe that a strong Thales makes Garmin and Lowrance strive harder to put out a better unit. We win when manufacturers compete for our dollars. THALES: Wake up. I just spent over six hundred dollars on a new gpsr, software, power adapter and car mount. None of it went to Thales. When a couple thousand prospective gpsr purchasers read this thread and vote with their wallets then and only then will Thales get a clue. Hope it isn't too late.

Why bother putting a can out there. Just post the coordinates. That way any idiot that actually went out there to find a container would spend even a little longer searching. Only problem would be we would have to add a new acronyn: DNS . . . Did Not Survive. Hehehe.

Thank you Peter. That was a very informative and well worded reply. I am glad to know that there are a people on these boards that actually hang around with the intention of engaging in informative discourse. Now would you please find my post on the 60csx observations section about EPE. Maybe you can explain that just because "my gpsr has a smaller EPE number than yours" it isn't more accurate. I'm sure that I am just opening myself for criticism but what the heck. Life isn't worth living unless people remember you. Hehehe.

I have read one uninformed quote after another: "I've had my xyz GPS down to y feet. My old xyz GPS would get only to z feet." Therefore since the number on this one is smaller it is more accurate. You all are killing me. I probably can't explain this very well because I'm not an engineer and I really don't care about the entire explanation. But for those who will listen here is my attempt to educate. The accuracy indication found on YOUR gpsr is its own "Estimated Positional Error". Estimated - an intelligent guess; Positional - where you are on this Earth; Error - that is an easy one. This is your units best guess about how far off it MAY be from the actual coordinates. The key word is estimated!!! This is not a true measurement of how accurate your GPS is. If the manufacturer was truthful and had enough space on the screen it would say: "I've taken all the measurements I can, calculated using 9 satelites and according to the guy who wrote my program I'm going to tell you how I think I am around this far off the mark. But really, I don't know. It is just a guess. Sincerely, your GPSR" If you had two gpsr's sitting next to each other and one said it had an accuracy of 8 feet and the other one said it had an accurancy of 15 feet which one is more accurate???? What if you the two units were sitting on a survey marker. The unit that said it was 8 feet off could in deed be 25 feet off and the unit that said it was 15 feet off may actually be 6 feet off. Don't judge your GPS by how accurate IT tells you that it thinks it is. Sorry for the long post but we could (and will) pages of this silly comparisions.

Questions: Does the "x" series really draw that much more power than the non "x" series? If it does, then does anybody know if the power drain is because of the new sirf chip or is it a combination of the chip and the fact that the unit now has to power two sets of memory (internal and transflash card)? No other Garmin unit(or any other current manufacturer's unit) combines a sifr chip, internal memory and removeable memory. I'm no engineer but seems to me that reducing the power consumption of any one of the above mentioned will have a positive effect; but how much effect? I purchased the 60csx with full knowledge that the magnetic compass and the altimeter would drain the battery even more. If I were hiking in the woods at an average pace of 3 mph would I have any need of keeping the compass turned on? Could I not turn it on and off as needed? Wouldn't that prolong my battery life? Couldn't the same could be said about the altimeter. My point is that to go out and use the 60csx I don't need to always run every possible feature. Hell I'm pretty sure that if the unit had an alarm clock that I would turn that off too? Thank goodness it doesn't. I love my gpsr . . . I hate my alarm clock. Maybe that is why Garmin doesn't need a snooze button on their gpsr's.

Ow. This is a tough group. I think that over the years Robert and I chatted a few times via the yahoo magellan users group about just how unresponsive Thales was to their customer's needs. I think Robert used the term "death by a thousand tiny paper cuts to describe the general aggravation about getting the Meridian series to live up to its potential. Superbly constructed unit that was way ahead of its time three years ago. I recently abandoned use of my Magellan and bought this terrific unit. I wish Garmin would address its file management system but busting their chops about an alarm clock or a barometer that tracks while the unit is off seems trivial. My cellphone has an alarm clock. I'll bet yours does too. As far as tracking the barometric pressure; I'm not sure I would want to be campong out in the woods and draining the batteries of the electronic device that will show me how to get back home. Besides several FRS radios have a NOAA weather channel that will give you barometer readings. Garmin: the Map60csx is a great unit. I can't wait to see what future firmware updates will bring.

If you keep up with the Yahoo Group of MapSend you will realize that a release date by Thales of say "September" does not necessarily mean that they were intending the release date to be September of 2003. Merely September, or October or November of any given year. Further their use of such fine mapping products such as the Tiger maps make us "loyal" Maggie users wonder just HOW outdated the maps that they use will be. But given the normal delayed delivery of mapping software the maps therefore are guaranteed to be outdated before delivery. LostNfound