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Garmin H Series firmware requests


dstedman

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I have a Vista HCX with the latest firmware. Here is what I think needs to still be fixed:

 

1) When I first turn on the GPS, and then turn the backlight on, don't reset the backlight to off when transitioning from the welcome page to the satellite page. Irritating when you first turn it on in the car at night, and you just want the light to stay on instead of waiting for it to get to the satellite page before turning the light on.

 

2) When hiking, I am getting way too much stopped time shown when I am still moving. I think that the GPS should continue to record time as moving when it loses satellites for a second unless it actually records two consecutive track pts at the same location.

 

3) If I get to Point A, turn off my GPS, and then turn it on again somewhere else (Point ;), it shows a straight track line across the map indicating that I have traveled as the crow flies from Point A to Point B, even though I never traveled it. The GPS should only show/connect tracks for points recorded while the GPS is continuously on. My map is full of crazy straight line tracks that aren't accurate. The first time I saw them I thought perhaps someone stole my GPS and flew around in a plane. LOL.

 

Otherwise, I really like this GPS. You can tell this new chipset is way more responsive. Energy-efficient, too!

 

dan

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1) When I first turn on the GPS, and then turn the backlight on, don't reset the backlight to off when transitioning from the welcome page to the satellite page. Irritating when you first turn it on in the car at night, and you just want the light to stay on instead of waiting for it to get to the satellite page before turning the light on.

I think you're just misinterpreting what's happening. It's not a start-up issue. When you activate the light, and it's not plugged into a power source, the light will go off after the predetermined number of seconds (which you can change). However, the light will automatically come back on whenever the screen changes, or a pop-up alert message appears on screen. If this really bothers you, change the time-out to a longer period.

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Prime, he's right. When you power up (on a 12V cord), and turn on the light, it will go off when the sat page comes up. Annoying, but not hard to get around; just don't turn on the light until the sat page come sup first; easy to see from the dash lights alone.

 

The straight lines in the tracks are VERY annoying. I agree with dstedman. My Camo eTrex even got that one right. You'd think they'd stay with the stuff that works rather than regress.

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3) If I get to Point A, turn off my GPS, and then turn it on again somewhere else (Point :laughing:, it shows a straight track line across the map indicating that I have traveled as the crow flies from Point A to Point B, even though I never traveled it. The GPS should only show/connect tracks for points recorded while the GPS is continuously on. My map is full of crazy straight line tracks that aren't accurate. The first time I saw them I thought perhaps someone stole my GPS and flew around in a plane. LOL.

 

Otherwise, I really like this GPS. You can tell this new chipset is way more responsive. Energy-efficient, too!

 

dan

 

You can fix #3 yourself--I don't even really consider this a bug. What you need to do is turn tracking OFF once you're done going to a certain place, then, when you're at a new place and you want to track to another place, turn it ON again. Just be more aware of turning tracking on and off and you should be fine.

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leog, it even does it if you turn tracking off and on. That's the whole issue in my post. I tried to follow all the roads at my hunting club and have them display on MapSource. When I came to a fork, I would take one fork to its end, turn off track log, go back to the fork, turn it back on and there would be a line from the fork back to the last point on the end of the first leg. Very unsightly on MapSource. So what I had to do was very cumbersome. I named all the roads and saved each track individually. Very cumbersome.

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hmm, mine doesn't do that. I have the Vista HCX with the latest firmware from Garmin's site. Tracking is off 90% of the time. I turn it on at the beginning of hikes, etc. Try clearing the tracklog and turning it off/keeping if off most of the time. Then turn it on only when needed.

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That's what I do. I'm running Firmware 2.40.

 

I clear the track log and reset the trip computer. I start walking to a fork and randomly pick a road and walk it to the end. At this point, I turn off tracks and go back to the fork. I turn tracks back on and start up the other fork and suddenly I have a long straight line from the end of the first road back to the fork. Really kind of stupid looking.

 

As I said earlier, saving the first track by a road name and clearing the track log gets around it but it's really annoying to have to do that.

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I don't understand the track thing. everytime you turn it off and on (and even every time you lose sat) it will start a new track. when you load the tracks into mapsource you should have had seperate tracks for each time you turned it off and on. at which point you could join them together in mapsource if you wanted.

 

or are you saving the tracks then loading the saved tracks? maybe that joins them together, I haven't looked at that. I always just take the active tracks right off the unit without saving.

 

with requards to the stoped time, it has nothing to do with the sats. you can have clear view 3m and it still doesn't show if you are moving slowly. it's simply the speed limit setting that they have made. if you are going slower then xx speed it doesn't show. and I guess if they make it slower the gps will have other problems. probably counting time when you are stoped or tracking everywhere while stoped. they are probably battling with the new sensor, and trying to find the middle point between tracking what should be, and not tracking what shoudln't be.

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I have also been annoyed by the track log issue (#3, above).

 

Starting the HCx in a new location starts a new segment of track log, but the first point in that log seems to be the location the unit had previously been turned off. I have seen the speed in that leg indicated at over 1000 miles per hour, too.

 

The track log capability should remain "low-maintenance" like it has been in other Garmins I have used. It has worked fine, without requiring starting & stopping, resetting, or clearing. I do understand that it wll take a few moments for the position calculations to settle down, but that was also true with StreetPilots I have had, 76 series, eTrex units, and so on.

 

It is clearly a bug related to the HCx, and should be corrected in a firmware revsion.

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3) If I get to Point A, turn off my GPS, and then turn it on again somewhere else (Point :wub:, it shows a straight track line across the map indicating that I have traveled as the crow flies from Point A to Point B, even though I never traveled it. The GPS should only show/connect tracks for points recorded while the GPS is continuously on. My map is full of crazy straight line tracks that aren't accurate. The first time I saw them I thought perhaps someone stole my GPS and flew around in a plane. LOL.

 

Maybe it was a drunk pilot just flying around lost and then the straight lines were differnet airports he was landing at trying to find his way home. LOL.

 

As far as the straight line issue with tracks, it is somewhat annoying but I can understand some benefits to how the GPSr is set up. The GPSr thinks it is always recording the same active track unless you tell it differently. If you loose battery power and weren't aware of it for some distance, you would still have your track (straight line) after you repowered it. Also, if saving to the memory card you will get a lot more detailed track on a long track (can set GPSr to record track to memory card and edit later in Mapsource... doesn't matter if you turn your GPSr on and off several times throughout day the entire days tracks are all recorded and named that days date). The way the track log records you won't forget to set it to record a track if you're recording multiple tracks. If you happen to be in any situation or a trip covering several days where you needed to record more than 20 different saved individual tracks you would have no way of doing this if the tracks were not linked together. You could also already have several tracks stored on your GPSr and need to store more than the 20 it will save. Granted, all tracks can always be stored to the memory card but that is of no help until you get back to your computer... not muct help for that week long elk hunting trip in the wilderness or that hike on the Appalachain Trail. It is very easy and fairly quick to edit out your straight lines in a track in Mapsource by splitting the track and deleting the straight line area.

 

So even though the straight lines are annoying, it does provide virtually unlimited tracks up to the 10,000 track points.

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1) When I first turn on the GPS, and then turn the backlight on, don't reset the backlight to off when transitioning from the welcome page to the satellite page. Irritating when you first turn it on in the car at night, and you just want the light to stay on instead of waiting for it to get to the satellite page before turning the light on.

 

Man, this one drives me crazy. I've told it in setup that I want the backlight on at 100% by default and that I want the timeout to be one minute. So why this on/off business at startup? What it should do is what Prime thought it did, turn the light on when the unit turns on and start the countdown to backlight off. So, in my case, the light should come on when I hit on and stay that way for one minute (if I don't touch anything). How hard is that to figure out?

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