GeekBoy.from.Illinois

I saw that the button was missing there too, but rather than power cycle, I selected "View Map", then hit the big green "Go" button. From there I could easily use "Where To" -> "Stop Navigation" to get out cleanly. Yeah, extra steps, but at least it was a clean exit and not a hard power down while still in the waypoint I had just created...

When you are at the "main menu", press the GPS Signal graph at the bottom center of the screen. That should get you to the screen you seek.

When I stil had my Colorado 300, I was using a 16GB SDHC class 6 card in it. It worked fine. I had previously used a 4GB SD (non-HC) card of the 133x "flavor" and it seemed to work most of the time, but I had occasional issues with GPX or map corruption when using that "no-name" brand card.

I tested this a little better this morning. It appears that the "Improved compass responsiveness in challenging GPS environments" changes may be the culprit. I have my compass set to "Auto". I don't know exactly what causes it, but on some initial starts of the GPSr, the compass is enabled, and it seems to take an excessive amount of time to automatically disable it. If on the compass screen, the "Hold Level" message is displayed, and the compass heading is "locked". Eventually the compass will "auto off" and the pointer then resumes working as expected. I also verified that the "Auto on" for the compass does not hit until 90 seconds after movement stops (I did not test at slow speeds). While driving, the compass seemed to be working properly so I pulled to the side of the road and timed how long it took for the compass to turn itself back on. Next I power cycled the GPSr and within 3-5 seconds of my resuming movement (>3 mph) the compass did "Auto off" and the pointer worked as expected. Once again, it would not automatically trn the compass back on until 90 seconds after movement stopped. I know that in my initial power-on this morning the compass did not "auto off" even though I had driven >20mh for over a mile, plus >40mph for over a mile. At that point I manually turned the compass off and things resumed operations as expected. Now that I know that the first power-on after a "significant" period of power off, the compass does not appear to automatically turn off as expected...

OK, here is one I've seen twice since my upgrade now. This morning when I left home to go to work, and this evening when I left work to come home. I turn my Oregon 400t on, then when I get to my truck, I connect an external power cable (an actual Garmin car power adapter), When I pull out of the parking place, I already have a satellite lock, and generally reporting about a 10-15' "GPS Accuracy". The issue I have seen twice now is that the "wedge pointer" on the screen sems to always be facing the direction when it first detected it's heading. Leaving home, I drive east to pul out of my drive, so the arrow is pointing east. I make a quick turn north for a block but the arrow continues to point east. Next I make a west turn and the arrow still points north. About a mile later, I'm heading north again and the pointer is still pointing east. At this point, I turn of the electronic compass, then turn it back on, and the arrow is pointing the proper direction for the rest of the trip. The trip leaving work is almost an exact repeat of the same symptoms, except I'm heading south instead of north. Once again turning the compass off and back on resolves the problem for me. This time I tested it while the compass was still off and the pointer didn't change direction, but when I turned the compass back on the problem corrected itself. Now I will see if it does the same thing yet again tomorrow.

Following your instructions (but with a different map location) I can reproduce the problem you are seeing. Most likely it is the same with the "+" and "-" buttons for zooming the map too. If I were a betting man, I would say that the developer probably assumes that the finger release is handled by the button because that is where the finger is when it is released. In this case, the button isn't handling the action though...

While there is a lot of information included here, this link seems to be one of the best referneces for you new Oregon: http://garminoregon.wikispaces.com/

Well, first off, just because the Flip MinoHD retails for $279, I wouldn't expect that you will be able to sell it for that much yourself. Most people would shop on-line and get them cheaper, and if they do pay full price, they will buy it from a store that offers them some warranty/support as well... Next off, the differences between the 550 series and the 400 series is more than the camera & 3-axis compass. The 500 series GPSr units have increased the number of geocaches and waypoints that the unit can handle, and rumors have it that they have removed support from loading geocaches from the SD card.

Realize that nRoute will not work well with the most recent maps released by Garmin. With this in mind, it may not be a good choice for moving forward, but it will probably get you by for a while.

It is hard to generalize across all Garmin units. Some Garmin units store Geocaches as waypoint (intermixed with "normal" waypoints). Others store them separately in GPX files. The newest Garmin GPSr units store geocaches in GPX files and therefore you can sort them just about any way you can think of. For me, I tend to sort my geocaches my Status (unfound & active, unfound & inactive, found, ...). Within status, I sort them down even further by county where the cache is listed. On one of my older Garmin units, it used the waypoint method, and I would just sort geocaches my proximity to the area I was planning to be. Since it could hold 1000 waypoints, I used to load about 900 geocaches and be able to cover an area of about 40 miles radius. Your eXplorist has a nice feature that I have not seen on another GPSr unit since. It only allows 200 geocaches per "file" but it does allow as many files as you can fit in the unit's memory or SD card. On the flip side of that though, there is no easy way to search through all the files to find the cache that is nearest to where you currently are. If you have 15-20 files, you need to potentially perform 15-20 "find nearest geocache" searches.

Disadvantages would be that you can't load the entire map set onto the SD card (it is more than 6000 segments, and larger than 4GB). Advantages might be it would allow you to free-up internal memory on the GPSr for maps that you use more regularly. I know I was using my 400t for testing only because it is the only Oregon I have available to me right now.

Has anyone tried this? Even with the "any name" map file support I still think the 4000 segment limit applies. Enabling and disabling maps really doesn't help because you can't enable/disable each file, it is still a per map layer switch. Even if you disabled a particular map layer (ie. Topo2008) I don't think it helps because the 4000 limit applies to all the maps you have installed on the card, not the maps that are enabled. I made some time for testing this last night and felt appropriate to come back and admit that you are correct. I originally thought that you could put the Topo 2008 maps into 4 different segment files, and "activate" the maps in segments based on which file/area you needed. When I ran my test, I saw that my Oregon 400t managed to "automatically" merge the segment files into a single map set. Since I did not have the time to load the entire country into multiple files, I did not exceed the segment limit but I would have if I had loaded the entire country into different files. In this case, it shows how just using Mapsource to build the IMG files and send them to the SD card, then renaming them will still not allow you to load the entire Topo2008 map from the DVD to your GPSr without problems. Here are a couple of other observations I made in the process. First off, the Topo2008 maps that were pre-loaded on my Oregon 400t did not merge with the Topo2008 maps that I was loading from my DVD. This tells me that the unit definitely sees them as different maps. Second of all, in my case, the Oregon did not save the map enable/disabled state across a power off/power on cycle. Every time I would turn my GPSr back on, all maps would be enabled, so I would go in and disable maps. This second observation might be an error in the way the beta software is working, so I will try to get a report off to Garmin on this. I am not sure if the any of the other observations I made in my testing merit a report to Garmin or not though.

Yes but small. The segments are larger on the pre-installed version, this allows the entire USA to be installed. If you use your DVD, you'll only be able to install ~4000 segments, roughly 2/3rds of the US. You are correct here, but with the latest software [beta] updates, I believe you can load the maps into multiple files (by region) and then only select the region(s) you need as long as you keep them below the segment limit. I have not tried this myself, but it seems to me that this software update is the one thing that makes those old claims true (OR 300 + Topo 208 DVD + SD card = OR 400t).

Many people have seen this issue, and in fact, it has happened twice to my wife. The USB circuit inside the GPSr has gotten "fried". In my wife's case, this happened by removing the USB cable from the GPSr while it was still connected to the PC causing a surge and burning out an internal electronics component. So far the only way I have heard to resolve this is to send the GPSr back to Magellan for service, or to buy a new GPSr. Good luck with "fixing" your unit.

Here is a follow-up to my comments from last night. I tested it again (several times) using the Garmin car power cable. The problems don't seem to be happening with the Garmin car power cable (today), but they are still happening with the "standard" USB cable. A little more testing has shown that the problem happens (for me) when I have an SD card inserted into the GPSr. I remove the SD card, and the problem goes away. I also tested this with several SD cards, including a retail City Navigator NT maps SD card. I hope to be able to get an email out to the beta team yet today...

OK, I took the plunge as well and updated from v2.99beta to v3.01beta. The first day or two I had no problems, then on Sunday I started having the problems of "crash" when powering up via USB cable (in Spanner mode). This happened When connecting to a USB port on my computer, or connecting to a blackberry charging cable I often use with my Oregon. I also tested this with my Oregon power adapter from Garmin and the same symptoms. Tonight, I tried removing some larger files from my SD card (a 12MB GPX file with 2000 geocaches, a 49MB POI file containing about 17K POIs) and had no change on the results. Next I reformatted the uSD card and the same symptoms stayed. Now, I must power-on my Oregon before connecting a USB cable either for USB Mass Storage mode, or for external power. I want to do some more testing to see if I can determine why it worked for a couple days before the problem arose.

I used to have this problem with my Colorado 300 from time to time, most often it would happen when I had a bad/corrupt GPX file on the GPSr. In my case, the only way I ever got those caches to be removed from my unit was to do the "Factory Reset" (press and hold the left & right option buttons while turning the unit on). Of course, this causes you to lose may custom config settings from the GPSr, but it does remove the "phantom caches".

The averaging issue is resolved in the most recent [beta] software update from Garmin. Using that same software update in caching along side my wife, her 60 Cx and my Oregon 400t seldom differ by more than 20 feet. In the most recent cases where we had larger differences, her 60 Cx wold make a sudden "adjustment" placing it in agreement with my Oregon. I haven't compared my Oregon 400t to any known benchmarks, but I have compared it to coordinates taken with my old 60CSx. I had let my old 60CSx average a location in my driveway for a period of about 20 minutes. When it was done, it gave me a set of coordinates and reported an "accuracy" of 4.4 feet (based on the averaging). I had my Oregon average a waypoint in the same location and it reported the same coordinates as the 60 CSx had. The Oregon had averaged it across several days and several different times of the day (for 13 samples) and it only made minor adjustments to the location (usually less than 4 feet). Using geocaches as a "validation tool" is poor at best. Having that in mind, my Oregon has reported "Dist to Dest" of 5 feet or less on the last 7-8 caches I have found when I was standing at the cache location. One thing I have noticed is that using the the [beta] software v2.98 while my GPSr is very accurate, it is reporting it's "GPS Accuracy" as numbers that are normally in the 8-12 feet range, but under some conditions those numbers have been growing to 20-26 feet. It appears as though the GPS Accuracy computation has a ow confidence in the accuracy even though it does appear to be quite accurate.

There is another option which I have not seen discussed just yet. There is a GSAK macro which will export a Field Notes (geoache_vists.txt) file based on your caches marked found but not including a "found it" log by you. This would allw you to quickly and easily log all your caches using the "Field Notes" area as used by many Colorado/Oregon/Trimble/iPhone/PN-x0 users.

I believe that you may have mistaken the Colorado and Oregon lines... The Colorado 300 only has about half as much free user memory as the Oregon 300.

I have managed to perform a binary file compare on the Topo maps from an early generation Oregon 400t with a middle-generation Colorado 400t. The two files compared to be exactly the same, so if you don;t have access to another Oregon 400t, you can use the maps file from a Colorado 400t if you can access one of those.

You have a very good point here, about loading 2 files and using different names. You don't need to have a computer to do the rename though. In order to load the entire country in just 2 segments, you would need to use an SD card for your maps, and if you are using an SD card, then any device that gives you files system level access to the SD card can be used. I have used my PDA for this, I believe I can use my cell phone for this (since it supports micro-SD cards like the Oregon uses). Also remember that renaming a file on an SD card is much easier and faster than loading a large map set from MapSource...

A map segment is a segment of a larger map. [] You don't control the size, unless you are the one creating the map. The Oregon/Colorado limits are (as taken from the Garmin support FAQ): * Oregon 200: 4,000 * Oregon 300: 4,000 * Oregon 400t: 3,571 * Oregon 400c: 3,546 * Oregon 400i: 3747 * Oregon 550: 4,000 * Oregon 550t: 3,571 From this one can infer/deduce that the Topo maps loaded on the Oregon 400t are 429 segments/tiles in size (about 2.6GB file size). The Topo 2008 DVD as over 6000 segments/tiles (and over 4GB space needed)

Technically it doesn't ignore the limit, it has the same limit on the number of segments as the 300 has. The way the 400t gets around this issue is that it uses a custom set of maps that is not the exact same as the ones from the Topo 2008 DVD. It uses larger and therefore fewer segments to hold the data (but I suspect you already knew this). If you copy the Topo maps from a 400t to an SD card and rename the file to GMAPSUPP.IMG, the 300 can load and use it just fine. Similarly, if you delete the GMAPPROM.IMG file from your 400t, you can't just reload it from the Topo 2008 DVD. There are too many segments, and the data is much larger exceeding the total memory installed in a 400t.

When using GSAK, the Smart Name is a unique version of the cache name shortened to about 7 characters. In some cases, it is the name itself, in others, it is an abbreviation. In cases where there are multiple names that are very similar it will make them unique. When I had the two caches "Resting in Salem" and "Resting in Waterford" in my database, the Smart Names were "Resting" and "RestinW", IIRC. It took the first 7 letters of the first cache, and then took the first 6 of the next and then searched forward until it found a different character for the 7th position. I don't remember exactly how it handled the two caches that had exactly the same name as I was using GC code by the time I had both of those in my database. I do remember that the Smart Name might change when you imported new Pocket Query GPX files, which was another reason I stopped using them when I did.