Garmin 2720, C340 With Live Traffic

[+NimravusHSSR]

Has there been any discussion on Garmin's upcoming products?

 

Namely the Streetpilot 2720 and C340 with Live Traffic information?

 

Wow, Garmin rocks. Those units will be AWESOME. Also the Rino 530 with 5 watts of position transmitting GMRS power due out Sept. 9th!!

 

Yahoooo......

[+hoxbox]

Dream machine would be a 2710 like the 2610 with CF card compatibility. I ordered the 2720 which should be shipping this week to compliment my eXplorist 600. Need to be as safe as I can on the road. Just wrote a GSAK script to ouput to Cachemate, MapSource, and eXplorist in one shot

Edited August 15, 2005 by hoxbox

[+NimravusHSSR]

Nice....

 

I think I'm going to sell my 60CS and Rino 130 and replace them with the 2720 and the Rino 530...

 

This wait for release is excrutiating.

 

So does anyone know how this FM traffic update thing works?

[+hoxbox]

You have to buy an addon and it's available only in certain cities. Check out http://www.tigergps.com/garmingtm10.html for more information

[+NimravusHSSR]

Thanks,

 

That does it. I'm pre-ordering. There is coverage in my area and surrounding cities also (LA, San Bernardino-Riverside)

 

Is Tiger a good place to buy stuff? (reputable?)

[+hoxbox]

Tiger is pretty reputable though I preordered mine for $819-$20 Preorder discount = $799 at http://www.getfeetwet.com/ProductInfo.aspx...id=010-00408-02

Shipping is $10 and they also offer free 2nd year of warranty. I called this store and the person I talked to said Garmin's ship date for this unit is "week of August 15th." The store seems reputable they even include links to their reviews at their help page http://www.getfeetwet.com/help.aspx (bottom)

 

One caveat to note they are based in Simi Valley CA so you'll likely be taxed. Tigergps is based in NY so no tax from them. Google maps hows Simi Valley CA not too far from LA so maybe you can just drive there at pick it up?

 

For this investment I'll likely get the 3 year extended warranty sold here http://www.buydig.com/shop/product.aspx?sku=MKGPSGR1000 for $49. Which according the the extended warranty company's website http://www.mackcam.com/faq/faq04.html can be bought separate from the shop you purchased your GPS unit.

Edited August 16, 2005 by hoxbox

[+Team Troglodyte]

We just received our Garmin 2720 which was to be a replacement for our Street Pilot III. So far I'm extremely disappointed with it - actually that's an understatement. I'm infuriated with it. It seems Garmin has done everything possible to make it unusable as a caching tool.

 

With the old SP-III, we could upload waypoints from GSAK and they would be displayed on the map along with their names as you drove along. GSAK doesn't seem capable of uploading to the 2720 via its USB interface. The device is recognized, but nothing is transferred. Garmin provides a loader, but it requires that the info be exported as a .CSV and then transferred with the loader (and it chokes on the "quotes" that GSAK inserts into its .CSV exports. Even when the data is in place, it does not seem to be displayed on the map when you are driving. Also the SP III allowed us to drive along with "nearest waypoint" selected and it would show a list of the closest waypoints with their distance and direction from present location. It doesn't look like you can do that either. The owners manual for the 2720 has been "dumbed down" to a point where it too is almost useless.

 

So, if you're planning to use a 2720 for caching purposes, you might want to hold off on that purchase till more reports come in. If we find a way to force this thing to cooperate, I'll post more info. Till then, beware. If anyone still wants a 2720, I may have one for sale at a good price.

[+horsegeeks]

We just received our Garmin 2720 which was to be a replacement for our Street Pilot III.  So far I'm extremely disappointed with it - actually that's an understatement.  I'm infuriated with it.  It seems Garmin has done everything possible to make it unusable as a caching tool.

 

With the old SP-III, we could upload waypoints from GSAK and they would be displayed on the map along with their names as you drove along.  GSAK doesn't seem capable of uploading to the 2720 via its USB interface.  The device is recognized, but nothing is transferred.  Garmin provides a loader, but it requires that the info be exported as a .CSV and then transferred with the loader (and it chokes on the "quotes" that GSAK inserts into its .CSV exports.  Even when the data is in place, it does not seem to be displayed on the map when you are driving.  Also the SP III allowed us to drive along with "nearest waypoint" selected and it would show a list of the closest waypoints with their distance and direction from present location.  It doesn't look like you can do that either.  The owners manual for the 2720 has been "dumbed down" to a point where it too is almost useless.

 

So, if you're planning to use a 2720 for caching purposes, you might want to hold off on that purchase till more reports come in.  If we find a way to force this thing to cooperate, I'll post more info.  Till then, beware.  If anyone still wants a 2720, I may have one for sale at a good price.

I can download waypoints from my Mapsource products easily through the USB on my 2620. I believe the 2720 is just an upgraded 2620 I was a little disappointed that GSAK wouldn't do it but it is very easy with Mapsource.

[+Team Troglodyte]

I can download waypoints from my Mapsource products easily through the USB on my 2620.  I believe the 2720 is just an upgraded 2620  I was a little disappointed that GSAK wouldn't do it but it is very easy with Mapsource.

horsegeeks is (are?) correct. By exporting a .mps from GSAK, importing it into the old Mapsource program left over from our SPIII and then using Mapsource to send it to the 2720, waypoints can be transferred. If you don't have Mapsource handy, Garmin will be happy to sell you their "Trip and Waypoint Manager" for a mere $30 or so, and it sounds like it should be capable of sending a .mps to the 2720, although I'd certainly talk to their tech support first, especially when I'm being asked to spend additional money to add functionality that should have been included on a unit with a suggested retail of well over $1000.

[+ClydeE]

I can download waypoints from my Mapsource products easily through the USB on my 2620. I believe the 2720 is just an upgraded 2620 I was a little disappointed that GSAK wouldn't do it but it is very easy with Mapsource.

Yea, and I was more than a little disappointed that Garmin chose to implement a different protocol to that of the 60c/s that also uses USB.

 

So now the Babel guys need to get hold of 2620, analyze it, and program for all the "quirks" that Garmin seem to include with their protocol specs. This takes a lot of both time and money.

[robertlipe]

Garmin will be happy to sell you their "Trip and Waypoint Manager" for a mere $30 or so, and it sounds like it should be capable of sending a .mps to the 2720, although I'd certainly talk to their tech support first, especially when I'm being asked to spend additional money to add functionality that should have been included on a unit with a suggested retail of well over $1000.

Clyde's take on this very much matches mine. Garmin seems ot go out of their way to make every model speak a different protocol. For the low end/high volume units, it's easy enough to take the donations coming into GPSBabel (the huge percentage of which comes from GSAK) to buy the hardware. I then spend the time to reverse engineer and/or implement the protocols and put them out.

 

The high end units have historically been a problem. When you're looking at $1000-ish entry tickets for the hardware, it's hard. By the sheer numbers, there are just plain fewer of them around and they cost 3-5x what a typical handheld does. I've had no luck trying to get loaner equipment from the various dealers or even other geocachers and I can count very few remote "here, try this and tell me what it says" developments as a success as it tends to be painful for both sides. Those approaches also tend to work poorly for ongoing support, so it really does make sense for me to have the hardware. So far, there just hasn't been justification for dropping the money and the time on that, but in recent weeks, it seems like there's been a growing demand for it.

 

I've been considering a "Super GPSBabel Plus Pro 3000" (never let cynical engineers name things...) in about the very price range you just mentioned. I've kicked around a number of ideas on the business model: buy the hardware up front and hope I can generate interest to recover my cost? take "directed donations" and start the work when the funds for that model would cover it? How would I "sell" such a thing and how would I stop copies from being passed around? (Serial number locks? Registration?) If I do 26xx and it doesn't work on 27xx|c3[234]0|i[23], do we have to start over? Am I going to spend more time administering such a thing then I will doing actual engineering on it? What if I get fatally hit by a bus when 3 projects are 90% funded? Should I fold the code into the free version after some time? How do I reconcile a free and a non-free version of the "same" project? Clearly I've given it some thought but don't really have a plan at this moment.

 

Turn a few dozen of those $30 copies of Trip and Waypoint manager into $30 copies of "Super GPSBabel Plus Pro 3000" (I'm already tired of that name :-) and it wouldn't be too hard to buy a unit, integrate support into GPSBabel, and be done with it. This could almost certainly be done by slipping it behind GSAK's back and thus totally invisible to Clyde. (He is wise enough to be uninterested in bits and bytes flowing over the wire and thus shouldn't incur any extra work for stuff like this.)

 

This basic model is how we did the original Garmin 60C/76C work that's now standard in GPSBabel and thus GSAK. I'm wondering if there's now enough 26xx/27xx owners to start up a project like this for those models. If you're a 26xx/27xx user and are interested in such a thing, pleaes contact me directly so I can gauge interest. (And don't whip out your credit card just yet. :-) If the response is just a giant yawn, as it has been on MacGPSBabel, I'll know to spend my nights on other things. :-)

[+Team Troglodyte]

Turn a few dozen of those $30 copies of Trip and Waypoint manager into $30 copies of  "Super GPSBabel Plus Pro 3000" (I'm already tired of that name :-) and it wouldn't be too hard to buy a unit, integrate support into GPSBabel, and be done with it.      This could almost certainly be done by slipping it behind GSAK's back and thus totally invisible to Clyde.  (He is wise enough to be uninterested in bits and bytes flowing over the wire and thus shouldn't incur any extra work for stuff like this.)

 

This basic model is how we did the original Garmin 60C/76C work that's now standard in GPSBabel and thus GSAK.  I'm wondering if there's now enough 26xx/27xx owners to start up a project like this for those models. If you're a 26xx/27xx user and are interested in such a thing, pleaes contact me directly so I can gauge interest.  (And don't whip out your credit card just yet. :-)  If the response is just a giant yawn, as it has been on MacGPSBabel, I'll know to spend my nights on other things. :-)

When "Super GPSBabel Plus Pro 3000" is available, I'll likely be standing in line to purchase it. In the interim, if there's anything you'd like to feed to my 2720 and see what it regurgitates, I'm game. Seems we were successful on a similar endeavor before.

[+horsegeeks]

Put us in line for the Super GPSBabel Plus Pro 3000 too. Sounds like you are beating your head against the wall Clyde and Robert.

[+tflight]

Has there been any discussion on Garmin's upcoming products? Namely the Streetpilot 2720 and C340 with Live Traffic information?

Or hold out a little bit for the rumored Garmin StreetPilot 7200 GPS.

[+geoPirat]

We just received our Garmin 2720 which was to be a replacement for our Street Pilot III. So far I'm extremely disappointed with it - actually that's an understatement. I'm infuriated with it. It seems Garmin has done everything possible to make it unusable as a caching tool.

 

With the old SP-III, we could upload waypoints from GSAK and they would be displayed on the map along with their names as you drove along. . . . .

 

. . . .

 

So, if you're planning to use a 2720 for caching purposes, you might want to hold off on that purchase till more reports come in. If we find a way to force this thing to cooperate, I'll post more info. Till then, beware. If anyone still wants a 2720, I may have one for sale at a good price.

Exactly the same goes for the Street Pilot c320.

 

Uploading Waypoints via GSAK -> MapSource -> USB to Garmin is no problem, but

 

- you won't see waypoints (caches) on the map

 

- you can't enter a waypoints coords by hand (only with street name)

 

- you can't delete all waypoints at once, only one by one. Workaound is a hard reset of the machine, so it looses all user data.

 

So this new unit c320 is a very big disappointment for caching. The Quest Unit I had used before worked much better, only the display was pretty small in the car.

[+Shifty]

I have the 2720 and use it for Geocaching. I actually find it works quite well. With the implementation of Categories and screen text you can not only upload icons that show what type of cache it is, you can also add text tags so you can see what the name is, who placed it, and what the diff/terr ratings are. That coupled with the fact you can now have 2000 waypoints instead of 500, really helps out on large caching trips.

 

I will admit however being a former 2620 owner I was a tad angry to see a lot of the power user features go out the window. To be forced to use a "Happy go lucky user friendly AOL type interface" I can't stand user-friendly crap, makes me feel like there is someone out there telling me what I can and can not know about.

 

True you cannot upload directly from GSAK to the GPS, however using GSAK to make a mapsource file is still a good workaround. And if I would have to choose between not being able to do it at all, or having to do an extra step or two. I'll do the extra work. But hey, thats just me. Feel free to hate this unit as much as the next guy.

 

S

[robertlipe]

As an update, I have studied the usb traffic on a 2610 I purchased. With some help from Team Troglodyte, I've confirmed the 2720 is a close mutant of the 26xx on the bus. It may differ a little, but it's different from the Vista/Legend/60/76/Quest in at least the same way the 26xx is different.

 

I know basically what has to be done to GPSBabel's guts to make it play nice. (It's going to be ugly.) I don't have a schedule or a plan on how I'm going to deliver it yet. I probably will withhold it from the public release for a while to help defray the equipment and development costs.

 

I'll probably make a mailing list for updates on that project. Contact me directly if you're interested.

[sdsdv10]

Hey Shifty54,

 

Having used both, would you recommend the 2620 over the 2720? Both are still available (similar price), but I have read more good things about the 2620 than I have the 2720.

 

Thanks,

Don