Garmin Oregon 450 gives blank discription page, freezes.

[mfuzz8]

Hey;

I'm fairly new at geocaching, and dealing with the GPS unit. We had downloaded a couple pocket queries a few days earlier, and everything seemed fine, we had no problems in the field that day. A few days later when we got into the field, we were able to bring up caches in a search, and hit "Go". But when we tried to go to the discription page, it came up blank and froze. When we re-booted the GPS, the main red directional arrow in "compass" was missing. We had to re-boot additional time to bring it back and still were not able to access the discription, but were able to log our find.

I'm thinking it might be a problem with the pocket query, if one was corrupted could it cause this behavior? I am running a Mac, and I downloaded them to Basecamp, then uploaded them to my device. If anyone has encountered this, any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks!

[+HHL]

[…] We had downloaded a couple pocket queries a few days earlier, […]

 

Cool, how do you manage that as a base member?

 

Happy Hunting

Hans

[+larryc43230]

Hey;

I'm fairly new at geocaching, and dealing with the GPS unit. We had downloaded a couple pocket queries a few days earlier, and everything seemed fine, we had no problems in the field that day. A few days later when we got into the field, we were able to bring up caches in a search, and hit "Go". But when we tried to go to the discription page, it came up blank and froze. When we re-booted the GPS, the main red directional arrow in "compass" was missing. We had to re-boot additional time to bring it back and still were not able to access the discription, but were able to log our find.

I'm thinking it might be a problem with the pocket query, if one was corrupted could it cause this behavior? I am running a Mac, and I downloaded them to Basecamp, then uploaded them to my device. If anyone has encountered this, any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks!

The rendering of HTML in the "paperless" Garmin units is less than perfect or foolproof. Oddball HTML tags, especially ones involved with tables, can cause a unit to either display a blank screen instead of the cache description or, in rare cases, actually cause the unit to freeze as yours did. I have an Oregon 550T, and my unit has done this (frozen) just once in three years of displaying thousands of cache descriptions.

 

Is this freeze occurring when you try to display one particular cache description? Look at that cache using a standard Web browser. Was there some sort of complex formatting used? If so, that might be the cause of the problem you're seeing.

 

If it's happening with any and all caches you try to display, there's some other problem involved, including the possibility of a corrupt pocket query.

 

--Larry

[mfuzz8]

[…] We had downloaded a couple pocket queries a few days earlier, […]

 

Cool, how do you manage that as a base member?

 

Happy Hunting

Hans

Hey Hans;

two of us geocache in the household, so we only have need for the one premium membership. My Wife holds that one!

[Colorado Bear]

This has happens with the Oregon. I do not know why. What I do is after laoding the gpx file into my 450, I turn it on an test that I can see several caches. If it can't and the norm is it hangs when loading, I take the batteries out for a few second, then reload the same file. This usually takes care of the problem. Just once I had to rerun the pocket query and then load that file. Hopes this helps.

 

Jay

[+dfx]

This happened to me only in two instances: 1) the GPXs were loaded on the SD card and the card came loose in the socket, and 2) after an incomplete GPX import, ie you added new GPXs, started up the GPS and then didn't let it finish the import, either turned it off before it was done, or sometimes it crashes during import (which is the same thing really). In either case, reloading the GPXs and letting it do the import again (and this time finish it) fixes that.

[mfuzz8]

Hey;

I'm fairly new at geocaching, and dealing with the GPS unit. We had downloaded a couple pocket queries a few days earlier, and everything seemed fine, we had no problems in the field that day. A few days later when we got into the field, we were able to bring up caches in a search, and hit "Go". But when we tried to go to the discription page, it came up blank and froze. When we re-booted the GPS, the main red directional arrow in "compass" was missing. We had to re-boot additional time to bring it back and still were not able to access the discription, but were able to log our find.

I'm thinking it might be a problem with the pocket query, if one was corrupted could it cause this behavior? I am running a Mac, and I downloaded them to Basecamp, then uploaded them to my device. If anyone has encountered this, any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks!

The rendering of HTML in the "paperless" Garmin units is less than perfect or foolproof. Oddball HTML tags, especially ones involved with tables, can cause a unit to either display a blank screen instead of the cache description or, in rare cases, actually cause the unit to freeze as yours did. I have an Oregon 550T, and my unit has done this (frozen) just once in three years of displaying thousands of cache descriptions.

 

Is this freeze occurring when you try to display one particular cache description? Look at that cache using a standard Web browser. Was there some sort of complex formatting used? If so, that might be the cause of the problem you're seeing.

 

If it's happening with any and all caches you try to display, there's some other problem involved, including the possibility of a corrupt pocket query.

 

--Larry

[mfuzz8]

Hey;

I'm fairly new at geocaching, and dealing with the GPS unit. We had downloaded a couple pocket queries a few days earlier, and everything seemed fine, we had no problems in the field that day. A few days later when we got into the field, we were able to bring up caches in a search, and hit "Go". But when we tried to go to the discription page, it came up blank and froze. When we re-booted the GPS, the main red directional arrow in "compass" was missing. We had to re-boot additional time to bring it back and still were not able to access the discription, but were able to log our find.

I'm thinking it might be a problem with the pocket query, if one was corrupted could it cause this behavior? I am running a Mac, and I downloaded them to Basecamp, then uploaded them to my device. If anyone has encountered this, any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks!

The rendering of HTML in the "paperless" Garmin units is less than perfect or foolproof. Oddball HTML tags, especially ones involved with tables, can cause a unit to either display a blank screen instead of the cache description or, in rare cases, actually cause the unit to freeze as yours did. I have an Oregon 550T, and my unit has done this (frozen) just once in three years of displaying thousands of cache descriptions.

 

Is this freeze occurring when you try to display one particular cache description? Look at that cache using a standard Web browser. Was there some sort of complex formatting used? If so, that might be the cause of the problem you're seeing.

 

If it's happening with any and all caches you try to display, there's some other problem involved, including the possibility of a corrupt pocket query.

 

--Larry

 

Hey Larry;

thanks for your help. It was more than one cache that were coming up like that, which made me suspect an error with the pocket query (either my error in downloading, then uploading it or a problem with the query itself. Another pocket query we installed is working fine. I may delete the other query and try re-loading it.

Thanks again

Marvin

[mfuzz8]

This has happens with the Oregon. I do not know why. What I do is after laoding the gpx file into my 450, I turn it on an test that I can see several caches. If it can't and the norm is it hangs when loading, I take the batteries out for a few second, then reload the same file. This usually takes care of the problem. Just once I had to rerun the pocket query and then load that file. Hopes this helps.

 

Jay

Hey Jay;

thanks for the reply! I will start checking my gpx files before I leave. I thought it was a problem with the files, deleting them and reloading them did the trick.

Take Care

 

Marvin

[mfuzz8]

This happened to me only in two instances: 1) the GPXs were loaded on the SD card and the card came loose in the socket, and 2) after an incomplete GPX import, ie you added new GPXs, started up the GPS and then didn't let it finish the import, either turned it off before it was done, or sometimes it crashes during import (which is the same thing really). In either case, reloading the GPXs and letting it do the import again (and this time finish it) fixes that.

 

Thanks for the reply!

the GPX files were downloaded directly to the device, so it was probably a problem with the import. Another Pocket Query worked just fine, so I will delete the other and reload it.

 

Thanks again!

 

Marvin

[+ecanderson]

It was more than one cache that were coming up like that, which made me suspect an error with the pocket query ...

Still might not be a problem with the query. By any chance were the "more than one" cache placed by the same person? They may have used the same problematic HTML technique on several of their cache pages.

 

If you do find that it is the same user, you might mention that there's something about those cache pages that is causing trouble out in the field. Any chance you could offer up some GC codes so we could view the original page content?

[mfuzz8]

Hey EC;

will have to check into that when I re-visit the geocaches. My first guess without looking back at the caches is that they were placed by different users. Thanks for bringing up that possibility, that never would have occurred to me! Something else I can watch for if it happens again.

 

Thanks

Marvin

[+Driddy]

I once had a situation with my 450 that was similar to what the OP described and the usual maneuvers mentioned above did not fix the problem. I wound up downloading and reinstalling the most recent Oregon software update and the problem went away.