Thoughts about my Lowrance Out&Back

[+MastahMatt]

Well, just returned my Lowrance Out&Back to Best Buy today, and I have to say I'm ambivalent about it. In the week and a half I used it, I'd grown rather attached to it. It has a lot of great features, and never, and I repeat NEVER lost a satellite signal in the woods and even under shorter tunnels and bridges. That was awesome. It updated quickly and gave me great feedback on my direction.

 

HOWEVER...

 

When you are .20 miles from something (or .30, or .40), the unit displays it like this: .2 (or .3 or .4). Then you quickly get to .19 miles from something, then obviously .18, .17, etc. But the unit keeps saying .1 until you reach .09, then switches to feet. This is a problem, as I am often looking for the absolute closest parking spot (I have a 4 year old and an 8 year old that go with us, and they get "too tired-ed to walkin' anymore" rather quickly), so I could be .18 miles from something, but the GPS says .10. I need that second digit! Somewhat of a nuisance, but I could deal with it.

 

Then there were the frequent restarts when I would log a field note and then use the "Back" button to go back to the cache list to grab a new cache. Sometimes after logging a field note the unit would tell me it was logged and then go to the list automatically. Great. Except it did this only about 20 percent of the time. The rest of the time it made me use the "Back" button. Fine, except about 20 percent of THOSE times, it would simply freeze up and restart on me. A bit of a nuisance but I could deal with it.

 

The unit would not accept .GPX files over APPROXIMATELY 3mb in length. Unacceptable. I want to add a 1000 cache PQ to the unit and it doesn't do it. I also had a PQ in my home area with a cache in it called "Weird Holidays (Pie) Day" that has a cache page that has a million digits of pi on it. This made any PQ in the area over 3 mb in size rather quickly. So I'd have to go in an edit this cache out of the GPX file. A nuisance, but I could deal with it.

 

Then the deal-breaker. When adding a waypoint by hand into the machine, i.e. a Multi-Cache, or when navigating back to your new waypoint for a newly hidden cache to double-check that the coords are correct (something I always do), the unit gets within 30 to 50 feet and says BEEP, "Destination Reached" and simply stops navigating. Why, why, why, oh WHY does it do this? It's bad enough that the things tells me my destination has been reached when it has NOT, but then it simply, oh, I dunno, QUITS NAVIGATING. There's no option or setting to change this feature, it's a known problem, and there have been FOUR FIRMWARE UPDATES, and good ones too, since the unit came out, and the problem still exists.

 

So, I had a lot of bad to say about the unit, but I actually enjoyed the features it provided. It could use a couple of refinements (outside of the above problems I listed), for instance, a feature to find a geocache by keyword in a list of thousands of caches rather than paging through all of them would be nice. I think Lowrance is absolutely on the right track, and I used a Lowrance before this one to great effect as well, the old, but trusty GlobalMap 100. Sadly, I'm going to have to break with my favorite GPS company and I'm going to go with a Garmin Oregon 450. An extra 150 dollars, but I've heard good things about it! Geocaching is my one big hobby, and I have to have the best I can afford to make it enjoyable, or what's the point? I'd bet money that Lowrance will either get the Endura line up to speed or will come out with a truly kick-a** product in the near future, but my addiction isn't willing to wait that long.

 

Thanks for reading.

[+bobandrobin]

You're gonna love the 450.

[+Indotguy]

I don't plan on returning my Out & Back but will use it when I go on long trail caching trips where the USGS topo maps are very handy. Otherwise, I have reverted back to my trusty H20c. The H20c has all the features and data fields the Endura line should have had.

[+geojibby]

Too bad to hear another sad tale for the Out & Back. I was super excited about this unit also. But now, I will probably wait to see the DeLorme PN-60 & Garmin GPSMAP 62s go head to head in the squared circle. Unless of course Lowrance fixes the stupid problems that exist with the Endura line up before the other units are released! You've got 1.5 months Lowrance! Hurry!

[+ryan3295]

Yep to bad for Lowrance, still glad I returned mine.

[NordicMan]

Yep those are all totally valid complaints, and they would irritate me too. We have a resident Lowrance representative "EnduraExpert" that visits this site often, hope he can shed some light on each of those problems. One particular problem though:

 

...When adding a waypoint by hand into the machine, i.e. a Multi-Cache, or when navigating back to your new waypoint for a newly hidden cache to double-check that the coords are correct (something I always do), the unit gets within 30 to 50 feet and says BEEP, "Destination Reached" and simply stops navigating...

I do believe Lowrance is aware of this "bug" and is supposedly working on fixing that one "soon".

[+geojibby]

The thing is, it should have been fixed in FW update 1 not *maybe* 5...

 

I do believe Lowrance is aware of this "bug" and is supposedly working on fixing that one "soon".

[+deercreekth]

I saw that these were on sale at Best Buy a couple of weeks ago. The Best Buy is new, and I wanted to check out their handheld selection. The Out&Back had some error about needing to reload software and was unresponsive. I wasn't looking to buy anything, but if I was that definitely wouldn't make a good first impression.

[+EnduraExpert]

Yep those are all totally valid complaints, and they would irritate me too. We have a resident Lowrance representative "EnduraExpert" that visits this site often, hope he can shed some light on each of those problems. One particular problem though:

 

...When adding a waypoint by hand into the machine, i.e. a Multi-Cache, or when navigating back to your new waypoint for a newly hidden cache to double-check that the coords are correct (something I always do), the unit gets within 30 to 50 feet and says BEEP, "Destination Reached" and simply stops navigating...

I do believe Lowrance is aware of this "bug" and is supposedly working on fixing that one "soon".

NordicMan you are correct that they are all valid complaints. They are items that are on the list of fixes to be implemented in the next firmware release. I had hoped to get them into this 1.4 release but we needed to get 1.4 released and did not want to wait any longer for additional fixes.

 

I am not happy with this and totally understand the frustration of our customers both current and former. I am going to try and do everything possible to get the features that us Geocachers really REALLY want in these units.

 

Please continue to provide feedback.

[+Druce_n_Eulla]

Have not ran into any major problems yet but after reading a few posts I know I will need to keep a hold of my eTrex H for when I need to do a multi or project a waypoint. Not a problem though it beats trying to paperless geocache with my laptop. Everything else with this unit is top notch. It is all about accuracy and this unit delivers along with a few extra perks.

[+EnduraExpert]

Have not ran into any major problems yet but after reading a few posts I know I will need to keep a hold of my eTrex H for when I need to do a multi or project a waypoint. Not a problem though it beats trying to paperless geocache with my laptop. Everything else with this unit is top notch. It is all about accuracy and this unit delivers along with a few extra perks.

We are currently working on a firmware upgrade that will allow you to project a waypoint and do a multi as well as several other features that geocachers have been asking us to add.