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Garmin Colorado 2.51 Firmware Bugs


qlenfg

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Found a strange bug today on the way home. Fired up my Colorado 300 at the office, switched to the automotive profile, enabled CNNA NT 2008, Topo 2008 and the basemap, selected my home as a goto waypoint, let the Colorado calculate the route, then switched to 3-D mode.

 

Not sure what happened, but after the first turn was announced and made, I looked down and the Colorado was off. I hadn't checked the battery gauge, so I assumed it switched off because the batteries were low, but I never got a warning beep or message. Pressed the power button to fire it back up and check the battery state, and it got hung on the boot screen -- the power switch did nothing.

 

Since I was in traffic, I couldn't mess around with it too much, but when I got near the house, I had enough time at a traffic light to pop the batteries out and restart the unit. It came up with the automotive map, acquired the satellites almost immediately and showed my present location. As I drove away, I realized it was still in navigation mode and was giving me proper directions for the route.

 

I passed a couple of POI's that were in the neighborhood, so I moved the pointer to see what they were. When I went back to the map I was still in navigation mode. I arrived at the house, and as I was getting ready to shut the unit off, I pressed the shortcuts button and the shortcut menu did not show the stop sign icon to end the navigation -- it had the regular where to icon.

 

Kinda strange.

 

I'm gonna try to duplicate it again tonight. Anyone seen this before?

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Not sure about the initial shutoff, but you never mentioned if the batteries were low.

 

Every single time I see the startup hang on the Garmin screen it is followed by the time sync issue when I boot the next time. Sometimes it might only be by a few minutes, but the time will always be what it was when I shut down. I've seen this in 2.4 and 2.51. Given your abnormal shutdown the hang you saw immediately before you this might have been a different issue.

 

The last bit is normal behavior. If you reach your destination, navigation stops and the stop sign disappears automatically. I have noticed with the Colorado many times you don't "hit" the destination, you have to be within a few feet for it to recognize that you have arrived. About 50% of the time when I arrive at Home navigation stops and the other times it doesn't.

 

Knock on wood but I don't think I've seen any new issues introduced in 2.51.

 

GO$Rs

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Yeah, I forgot to mention the battery state -- the unit showed two bars and it ran another 40-45 minutes while hung on the boot screen. Still had two bars when I restarted it several miles from home. The weird thing was that while stuck on the initial screen it continued to map the trip and know where it was. Downloaded waypoints and tracks -- guess what -- no tracks found. All the existing waypoints were OK.

 

I thought about the navigation thing after I posted the message, but I hadn't seen it stop by itself. Lots of trees and metal in my back yard, so chances are it never quite got to the waypoint I set previously.

 

At any rate, I'll see if I can't duplicate the original issue this weekend.

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Well, I attempted the upgrade and my CO 300 is now functionally "dead". The upgrade never took, it froze my computer while upgrading and now the CO is froze. Removed the batteries and rebooted the CO. Now whenever I attempt to hook up to my computer, it freezes right away. My computer also is not noticing the CO, keeps referring to it as an unknown device. When I check the Software page it is still showing 2.40.

I have tried everything to get it working properly. Also, I have to remove the batteries after each attempt to hook it up to my computer as it freezes. Have tried a cold reset, reinstalling the drivers, reinstalling software, etc. and nothing is working.

Very upset and will be returning unit tomorrow. This thing has been "buggy" since I purchased it. Every cache I have done has been blind using this thing as the navigation has been none existant.

Should I exchange it or change to a 60CSX? I love the idea of paperless caching, just not into the headaches. Tried the Triton 500 before the CO and found it even worse.

Hate to say it, but my Explorists 500 was an excellent and trustworthy unit. Just unable to upgrade the firmware, the charging/usb cable is broke and the battery is shortlived.

Team TeeKay

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Well, I attempted the upgrade and my CO 300 is now functionally "dead". The upgrade never took, it froze my computer while upgrading and now the CO is froze. Removed the batteries and rebooted the CO. Now whenever I attempt to hook up to my computer, it freezes right away. My computer also is not noticing the CO, keeps referring to it as an unknown device. When I check the Software page it is still showing 2.40.

I have tried everything to get it working properly. Also, I have to remove the batteries after each attempt to hook it up to my computer as it freezes. Have tried a cold reset, reinstalling the drivers, reinstalling software, etc. and nothing is working.

Very upset and will be returning unit tomorrow. This thing has been "buggy" since I purchased it. Every cache I have done has been blind using this thing as the navigation has been none existant.

Should I exchange it or change to a 60CSX? I love the idea of paperless caching, just not into the headaches. Tried the Triton 500 before the CO and found it even worse.

Hate to say it, but my Explorists 500 was an excellent and trustworthy unit. Just unable to upgrade the firmware, the charging/usb cable is broke and the battery is shortlived.

Team TeeKay

Can i relate.......I'm on my 3rd Colorado so I was pumped to upload a new release..........same thing..............dead in the water...........I'm trying to make it work but I only have so much patience.......
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:) Well, tried everything! From hard reset to diagnostics to a full reinstall from my run-cmd-066101000230.rgn and nothing works. The unit is useless and done for. Back to the store in the morning!

 

Not having a good electronics month; bought Triton 500 and returned it! My 22 inch LCD monitor died and bought new one last week; it has to be returned because there is a green line down the center of the screen. My daughters computer blew its power supply and now that must be changed. Now to top it off, my CO300 is dead.

 

snomchfun, anything particular you have done to your 300 to cause this that I might have also done? You running any secondary maps? Using a SD card? Anything?

Team TeeKay

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:) Well, tried everything! From hard reset to diagnostics to a full reinstall from my run-cmd-066101000230.rgn and nothing works. The unit is useless and done for. Back to the store in the morning!

....

Not having a good electronics month; bought Triton 500 and returned it! My 22 inch LCD monitor died and bought new one last week; it has to be returned because there is a green line down the center of the screen. My daughters computer blew its power supply and now that must be changed. Now to top it off, my CO300 is dead.

 

snomchfun, anything particular you have done to your 300 to cause this that I might have also done? You running any secondary maps? Using a SD card? Anything?

Team TeeKay

i was thinking the same thing............definately using sd card...........only using map source CDN topo..................hmmmmm......
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Witch GPS version did you got? 2.50 or 2.60

If you got the 2.50 :) its a real lemon you should return it and ask for a 2.60 in return!

I had the 2 unit in hand and the 2.50 is definitively slower and more unstable.

when I receive the 2.50 for the first time I had to boot it 4 time :) ( out of the box) to get a boot without a freeze.

Now I have a 2.60 and I really love it!

 

Good luck! B)

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:) Well, tried everything!

 

Did you call Garmin? I know you can sometimes reload firmware on a dead 60 series by holding the rocker switch. Maybe there's a way to do it on a Colorado.

 

Well, being that I bought only two weeks ago at Wally World, I feel having to call Customer Support is unacceptable. Better to return and exchange.

 

Not really mad, my own fault for loading Betaware onto my unit. Should have known better, Betaware never works for me! (I have extremely bad luck when it comes to consumer electronics???)

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Rich,

 

I'm guessing you are seeing the "position error" issue some of us are seeing.

 

I first posted about this thread. Since no one else seemed to be complaining I figured that it might be something I was doing or an issue with my unit. Recently this thread was started and I've had two other people mention a similar issue on the CO wiki in the last week.

 

Here's my theory. When the Colorado starts cold and is put under difficult signal conditions I believe it builds in an averaging error that takes a long time to flush out. There are two problems. In most cases when I see the issue I'm off by >100' (usually more than 200') and GPS accuracy is seldom over 40'. The second issue is that when you do get back to a place where you have better reception it takes a very long time for the error to be "flushed" out. I've stood in place for over 10 minutes and observed almost no change. After 15 or 20 minutes of solid reception it seems to clear itself up. One thing that always seems to work -- power cycling the unit gets rid of the issue. This is main reason why I believe that there is some problem with the averaging done by the CO's software.

 

GO$Rs

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I don't know if this is a 2.51 issue or a Groundspeak issue, but when I push my Field notes to Groundspeak I only get the first note. None of the rest upload. Has anyone else had this problem?

This may be as designed. Did you 'uncheck' the "Ignore logs before..." box when uploading? If not, it will ignore logs before that date, and not upload them.

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I don't know if this is a 2.51 issue or a Groundspeak issue, but when I push my Field notes to Groundspeak I only get the first note. None of the rest upload. Has anyone else had this problem?

This may be as designed. Did you 'uncheck' the "Ignore logs before..." box when uploading? If not, it will ignore logs before that date, and not upload them.

If anything, mine tends to go the other way. When I check the box to exclude older finds, it always uploads my most recent finds just fine. And it always excludes finds that I uploaded prior to my most recent previous upload. But it seems to include finds from that "most recent previous upload." The only solution to this seems to be to manually delete the visit log text file from the GPSr after each upload.

 

In any case, this is almost certainly a GC.com problem. The whole file gets uploaded to the web site, which filters it (or not) as it sees fit.

 

On the other hand, I do vaguely remember a post or two which implied that the format (perhaps the character encoding?) of the text file changed with one of the recent firmware releases. Unfortunately, that's all I remember.

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