MartianRabbit's Cronicles of the Triton 2000

[+MartianRabbit]

Hello Fellow Geocachers!

 

I saw and heard about the new Triton line, and on blind faith, I purchased a Triton 2000 just knowing that I made the right choice without all the research. As I assumed Magellan would build on the experience and feedback from how well the Explorist 600 worked, which I also own and use, would have all the features plus the ones we all have been waiting for!

 

Well, I have played with mine for 3-4 days now, and did a comparative feature test between the Explorist 600 and the Triton 2000. For the Geocaching functions, as I have been using them for the last couple of

years.

 

I have to say , I love the look & feel, and the size. I have fairly large hands, so it fits me well. I like the stiff buttons as they will wear in I am sure.

 

The Display is great! Even the touch screen works well! And the resolution is what I have been waiting for! I use a Palm Tungsten C to do my Paperless Geocaching, using CacheMate, and relied on the found function in the X600 which date and time stamped my Found caches for the logging order.

 

The ability to use Geocache waypoint files and as many as the SD card would hold, always made a great way to cache in specific locations. Just create another Center in GSAK, and boom 200 caches in a file called the caching location typically.

 

Even the Map management was pretty much the same process. Crunch a Map in Mapsend Direct Route then load it in USB file transfer mode. The deal here is the USB function in the X600, it made the SD card look like a hard drive directly to the O/S.

 

Well,, I am really hoping they are not finished with the programming of features, as it needs some work to get the features needed to make this an Awesome Hand Held.

 

I must have read the Forums for hours in the last 3-4 days too, and I didn't really see any technical comparisons between the explorist features and the Triton features, and decided to break my Lurker status and make a contribution.

 

Since there are a lot of things to talk about and consider, lets break it out in sections. I will not talk so much about the Camera, MP3 and Media functions, I want to talk about what is fundamental to All Magellans from

the SporTrak Color my first, to the eXplorist 500/600 which I have fully used all features.

 

Lets start with the basics from out of the box.

 

All parts were in the box. Neatly packed.

 

I put in the 2 Alkaline Batteries that came in the box, and powered on the Unit. I didn't even crack open the Manual yet. I being a Techno Geek, I like to hack my way through the Interface as a Discovery of features and screens. Read the Manual when you get stuck. In about 3 hours the batteries were

dead. I then broke out the NiHD's.

 

The loss of the Proprietary battery pack is a real bummer! The Triton now takes individual AA cells again, and NO Charging circuit in the unit! This means your back to carrying Rechargeable again. The unit behaves like the SporTrak Color in this respect. It will use power from the cable when connected in USB mode or in a cradle with a Cig lighter cable, and saves batteries. Some do like the ability to use the Recharable AA's so this Unit is for you in that respect.

 

I switched between some of the screens and landed on the Satellite screen, which was already acquiring Sats. I backed up a couple of screens to the Compass, and figured out how to calibrate it in a few minutes. This was a bit clunky, and the firmware did a Dr Watson like crash, and I had to power off and power back on using the power switch. Where did the leveling bubble go??? Sure miss that, how do I know my surface is level? Naa, I field hand rotate them and works fine! Who cares if it is level! Yes it matters!

 

No biggy at this point, I went right back to the calibration. It is a bit harder than the X600, but easier than the SporTrak Color which was quite temperamental. Ok, got the Compass calibrated, and did my compass rose in my backyard checking various predetermined land marks and checked my placement

with the North star.

 

So this test passed, and seemed ok. I then moved on to some of the basic configuration like the mapping and coordinate system. Well after reading the manual, and playing with the settings, I was freaking out as I could not get the unit to do (DEG MM.MMM). This is the Geocaching standard! YikeS!

 

So, I set aside the coordinate thing for a bit and looked over the create waypoints, and Geocaches. I then soon realized, this unit is not usable out of the box. Hmm, well, I didn't let that stop me, so I then started to get all my software together, hunkered down for an in depth Tech troubleshooting session.

 

I noted a file transfer mode on the connectivity section, and could not get the O/S to discover the hardware. So I was not sure what to expect yet, since I could not talk to the Unit. I didn't bother with VantagePoint on the Disk that came with the Unit, I downloaded the latest from Magellangps.com.

This was common in the forums.

 

Installed VantagePoint and got the Unit talking right away. VantagePoint holds all the communications Drivers for the Unit. And it connected right away. So now I was connected to the Unit, and it was reporting the 1.11 version of firmware installed. I discovered the update button on the tool

bar and upgraded the Firmware in the Unit.

 

Restarted the Unit, and the look and feel of certain sections have changed, and things seem to be faster. The file transfer function was eliminated, which means to me, that the direct access to structured file systems is gone. At least for now.

 

Ok, that just means they decided to run a flat file system on the SD card blind. BTW, which I am using a SanDisk 4Gig in this unit. After running the upgrade, the size reported by the Unit is still 878M Initial Memory size of the SD card. This problem existed before the firmware upgrade to 1.14 and Still exists. So this is Bug #1. Later, I examined the memory detail after loading several Maps, Waypoints and it says I have nothing installed, but the memory free had dropped.

 

Ok, back to the coordinates system! Thank goodness for this Upgrade as it fixed the coordinate system problems I had. I am now running WGS84 with lat/long set to accuracy of (Deg MM.MMM). So far so good.

 

Now I was really ready to test the accuracy of the Unit. I went out back and snapped a couple of coordinates in a relatively short amount of time. Setting from "current location" and from a "point on Map" are quick and painless. The stories of marking a new point and modifying it with the input interface in dozens of taps easy when modifying a whole waypoint are true. The interface does work though. This is where the touch screen works well with data Entry and the tiny stylus that comes with the Unit. In fact, you

get a little five pack of styli in the box!

 

As others have said in the posts, the accuracy is Great! I was within 3-6 feet of each "Created Waypoint" They no longer call it "Marking", but traditionally that is what it is. I even checked one of my own caches I had set a couple of years ago down the street. It was within 15 feet of the posted coordinates. I even snapped a new waypoint and set a new Point-to-Point route to the new waypoint and was dead on at the cache, and only drifted around 3 feet!!

 

Next I created a Geocache. Now that is cool! I will get back to that in a bit later.

 

Next, I wanted to see what VantagePoint did on importing GPX files full of Geocaches. Let me just Say Johnny Vegas's concern about the hierarchical file system missing are founded. You can no longer access the SD cards like a USB thumb Drive. VantagePoint is the only way to get stuff on and off the Unit.

 

I Played half the night trying to see what the limitations are with the Goecache Management, and it needs a lot of work. Maggie, Neat who ever coined the term, Magellan, needs to learn a few tricks that Clyde has

learned with GSAK. The performance is very slow, and there is no sense of center, and shows by distance makes no sense. I agree with one post, why deal with the logs if you are not going to even deal with the descriptions. The linkage back to GC.com is sufficient for me. That would be a Great

feature, to have the Descriptions, but the info level is fine for geocaching in my opinion. I just want to be able to mark them found and export that back to GSAK where there are Macros to semi-automate the online experience.

 

There appears to be a serious limitation in the number of Geocaches you can put into VantagePoint. The largest file it can process I have discovered so far is 1000. But any subsequent loads for more, error out. I will need to test the limit later. I at one time had 25,000 Geocaches in GSAK and those

all fit on My Palm. There is enough memory in the unit and on the SD card to

do wonders!

 

So, Lets talk about the Map monument and How the map loading works. I have Mapsend Direct Route V2.00 I have had since I had my SporTrak Color and also used it on My eXplorist 600. The process is different for creating the Maps for the X600 than the SporTrak Color, and the Triton is the same in this respect as the X600.

 

The Serial Numbering scheme and how you serialize the Maps when creating regions is the same as the X600. I use the Write to Disk method. The V2.00 product allows you to mate up with 3 Units.

 

I used one mating on the Triton 2000 with no problem! I grabbed a Region with Californian And Nevada, Arizona. Both States in full on one region is about an 83Meg Map.

 

I then moved the Map to the VantagePoint working Directory and added the Map into VantagePoint, and it Popped a message, Map Authorized, and Initialized! This was Great! I then pushed the map to the Triton 2000 in about 15 minutes. After it loaded, I shutdown VantagePoint to disconnect and loaded the Map. Wooo Hooo! This was Great! I now have a Detailed map, and it was performing very well! Within a couple of seconds switching between screens as if it didn't really notice the size of the Detailed Map.

 

So far so good. I decided to test the Routing functions I fiddled around and poked through the screens, and low and behold, I can't figure out how to do a Street Route. Every time I set a Waypoint or Geocache, it only ever goes into point to point mode. So Bug #2. All Routing functions are none existent. NOOOO! This can't be. How am I to Route to Geocaches? This is a SHOW STOPPER!

 

Well, I decided to keep going and see where the Geocache management lead. I read out on the Tritonforum.com site, and found some of the limitations that had floated around, and the Triton 2000 is suppose to hold 2000 Geocaches! That is a lot! I didn't know this limit when I tested the Geocache portion,

as I only put in 500 and it took them! Well, with the trouble I am having with the limits in VantagePoint, I can't seem to get 2000 on the Unit. The Forums suggested a limit of 300 for now, but I did get 500 on the Unit. It just was not stable after that. It seems to be running ok with 100 at the moment.

 

This was carved from another Post by gulo, on tritonforum.com.

 

There are certain limits of how many user objects can be uploaded on the device:

 

Triton 200/300: 500 WPT, 500 GC, 20 Routes/25 points each.

Triton 400/500: 1000 WPT, 1000 GC, 40 Routes/25 points each.

Triton 1500/2000: 2000 WPT, 2000 GC, 40 Routes/50 points each

 

But now for the Deal Breaker for most of you out there. The Paperless aspects for the Geocaches is None existent! No way to mark them found! You can edit the Icon, waypoint name, lat/long, difficulty in whole unit steps only, (The X600 shows them in half steps), Hint and that is it. You can add and delete them, but you can't mark them as found. Cachemate in a Palm is still your best friend.

 

The names are also broken on the maps. I have names set to on for Geocaches in the detailed map settings, but the hover is the only thing that works. This is a cool feature of the touch screen. You touch a cache or scroll and hover, and it pops the whole name in a shadow. This is also the same behavior for all POI's. Show waypoint names seems to work ok, in Hiking profile where I have that set.

 

There is a Geocache Icon setting for unfound/All/Off in the Map settings, which suggests I can make them Found, so maybe I overlooked the function in the Manual, which I referred to quite a bit after my initial out of box experience.

 

The Unit having 500 Geocaches in it became unstable, and the detailed map page was taking 10-15 seconds to change to the Map screen and I can consistently crash the unit pressing and holding the "Page Go to" button, so I think it is trying to render all the geocaching Icons is why the slow screen transition to and from the map page. Once I reduced the amount to 100, the Unit seemed to work without any problems, and I had read one post that indicated stability up to 300 Geocaches. The Unit needs to be able to manage a lot to be a viable unit.

 

The Search functions for both Geocaches and waypoints are broken. Major Bug #3! The Nearest function is completely broken, as some have said. Clearly the orientation on the map is correct, but the list is sorting on stuff miles away. The name sort is the only one that works.

 

Getting the Geocaches on and off the unit in mass is very difficult and the synch function took hours to resynch several hundred caches off the unit, which is the only effective way to do it. There is a mass delete function in VantagePoint but not on the unit.

 

Tracks. Hmm,, There was some discussion I saw on this too, and the Tracks Interface Must be broken. I would not believe that it didn't work just like the other structures for Caches, Waypoints and Routes. You can save the current track with a filename, but the filenames are not present in the display. VantagePoint sees them, and the names of them. You can synch them and delete them from VantagePoint, but have no control at the Unit. The tracks once saved, can be shared. I will try and get a Nemesis hike converted and posted for a Demo. That is how they seem to appear at this time. So you build a trail and view it as a Track. These are colored blue. Purple is the point to point line color and yellow is the deviation color. Track is orange.

 

I did a trip to work and back with it just watching the track performance, and it stopped tracking after a while. I think they got the limit all wrong?, and I remember the X600 had 2000 points per track, and it just

wrapped after the 2000. This track should be way less than 2000 points for just 50 miles of travel. I can go from here in the North Bay in California, to San Luis Obispo, and the X600 would hold the whole track. Ooops, I reset the unit again after another lockup, and now the track is showing again the whole way. Well, looks like there are more then just Track Management problems, as the tracking itself looks buggy.

 

VantagePoint could use some features too in the management of caches going on the Unit. They have a clunky single checkbox selection system per cache. There needs to be a "Select all" "Unselect all" option at a minimum. Who wants to go through 2000 caches selecting and deselecting to get the ones you want? This is where the X600 and the individual Geocache files has a huge advantage. I am attempting the Max load now. I exported 2000 unfound caches into a gpx file, and by my calculations, it will take VantagePoint

alone 2.2 hours to complete. I hope they go in the unit faster than that. I would never get to go Caching. Arg! Well, it didn't work as I had said earlier.

 

Well, so far battery life is not that great. I can get about 6 hours, with the backlight set to low, turning off the backlight while not using the Unit. It could be my NiHD's are old. I heard there are some new L-ion AA

batteries on the market, and I hear they have some good capacity. So that may be the ticket for long battery life. Be prepared on a 10-12 hour hike to bring a couple of spare sets.

 

Another quirky comparison is when a X600 is cradled with power, the unit will stay bright on backlight until you select the brightness level. If not cradled, it defaults to the 30 second timer I had set in the Unit.

 

The way the Triton behaves at this point is different. I also have the backlight to auto turn off after 30 seconds, and when the Unit is first initialized, it turns off the backlight after 30 seconds of idle time. But

if you touch or change the brightness, the default 30 second timer when running on batteries no longer shuts off the backlight after 30 seconds. It stays at the level you set it until next Unit initialization time.

 

Well, the bottom line is the Unit has lots of potential, and I hope Magellan listens to us beta testers, that they have some work to do, and that these units could really rock! lets hope they do the right thing.

 

BTW, I also loaded the Yosemite free Topo NG map that came on the CD with the Unit. It was self upgrading and was able to talk to the Unit Directly. Which means they have an Interface Specification available, so Clyde from GSAK can have a way to talk to the Units some day. All the posts about the

maps not being Free are true. You have to have the Activated CD's to get the maps. But they work, and look nice! Their is only support for level 4 and Level 5 detail at this time.

 

In the mean time, I will open some online support requests to get some feedback from Magellan. I am also hoping others will read my post, and see there is hope, but more work to be done. If anybody had direct access to any of the Magellan Reps, have them read my post. I am also more then willing to be a beta tester or try anything cachers want me to look at. I know this will generate some questions too. So lets hear from you!

 

Have a Great day!

 

MR

[+SnoWake]

Wow - detailed and thorough review, MartianRabbit.

 

Sounds like Magellan has their work cut out for them: there are definitely some deal-breaker bugs in that list. Some of them are just plain weird: No auto-routing? And some of the elapsed time for pushing maps and caching data seem a bit outrageous.

 

I've only had my Colorado 400T in hand for a couple of hours - but already, I've pushed the City Navigator 2008 street maps to it, and confirmed that I can route to caches. I'll have to do a little write-up of my own, once I gain a bit more familiarity with the unit.

 

Here's hoping that Magellan releases another firmware upgrade soon, and your bug list diminishes significantly.

 

Thanks for sharing your experiences!

[+JohnnyVegas]

Thanks for the review

The limit on the number of caches is a deal breaker for me, if I could load 5,000 caches I could live without the file storage on the SD card. I cache in a large area most of the year, as the Tritons stand at this time they will not meet my needs.

 

The battery is also a problem for me, not a major one, but it is a problem.

 

The auto routing is not something I would use in a hand held GPS, I have use a Meridian gold in the past for auto routing. Now I use a Garmin street pilot C320 for street navigation. It is not the best but it was only $150.00 at Frys when I bought it last year.

 

Not being able to mark a cache as found is also a minor problem for me.

 

It would appear that the Tritons have been desinged more for the backpacking market rather than the geocacing market, or at least it would appear that geocaching was an afterthought.