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First Thoughts on Garmin 64st


Chipper3

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I decided to augment my iPhone apps with a "real" GPSr and got a good price on a Garmin 64st.

 

I guess I will learn how to use and will give it a chance but my first thoughts:

1.  I will never use a most of the specialty apps like Calendar, Stopwatch, Hunt and Fish, etc.   I think I paid for stuff that my iPhone is much better at.

2.  The battery life for regular old batteries is very low.  I would need 6-8 batteries to get thru a day vs just one charge  for my iPhone

3. The Basecamp and Garmin Express are clunky and I am still not sure what that does for me.

4. The Birdseye high resolution  imagery experience was poor.  Any size map download (area) just turns into blur when viewed on the screen.  I would much rather be looking at my various mapping programs and Google Map or GPS Pro app than the Garmin screen.  I understand that I was too aggressive in selecting an area to download thru Basecamp.  I can't even DL just a small city without the imagery flipping to low resolution.  And Basecamp takes forever to Download just about anything..

5.  I can put up with the 20 year old interface clunky interface.

But on the positive side.......

1. I like seeing the satellites and what opportunities I have for obtaining very good coords.

2.  I love the waypoint averaging feature.  I bought a true GPSr to acquire really accurate and precise coords for placing caches and this unit delivers!

3.  I can rearrange the menu items and will just put the few usable (from my frame of reference) features at the top and easily accessible.

 

I suspect that the dirt cheap entry units like the eTrex 10 prolly deliver the same location accuracy.

 

I'm sure that as I go up the learning curve, I will use more features but I think an entry level GPSr for accurate final coords and an iPhone is the right combination of tools for me.

 

Chipper3

 

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11 hours ago, Atlas Cached said:

4. While BirdsEye satellite imagery is not as current as some other providers, it is anything but blurry. It can be downloaded at three different resolutions, which did you select? I always use the highest.

First, thank you for all your comments.

 

I have found thru searching other forums as well as  my own experience that if too big an area is selected to download then , even at high resolution, the server delivers a low rez image.

I can obtain a high rez but the area I have to select is very small in area.

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11 hours ago, Atlas Cached said:

2. You are doing something wrong here. Which batteries are you using? The battery test results for the GPSMAP 64 at GPSrChive worst result was better than 20 hours, with the best result more than 50 hours. I will guess that you always have the backlight on 100%, it is one of the biggest po we er consumers....

Thank you for all your comments.

 

I use regular old Energizer batteries.  The power check shows lots of battery life but I get alerts saying that the battery level is low.

 

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12 hours ago, Atlas Cached said:

4. While BirdsEye satellite imagery is not as current as some other providers, it is anything but blurry. It can be downloaded at three different resolutions, which did you select? I always use the highest.

I will try to learn more about the device.  I picked a very small area and selected highest rez possible.I will report results.

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3 hours ago, Chipper3 said:

First, thank you for all your comments.

 

I have found thru searching other forums as well as  my own experience that if too big an area is selected to download then , even at high resolution, the server delivers a low rez image.

I can obtain a high rez but the area I have to select is very small in area.

 

Then download multiple segments so you can enjoy higher resolution imagery!

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regular alkaline batteries will give you the least performance of the three battery types. Lithium (such as the Energizer Ultra) will give you the rated battery life that Garmin advertises. These batteries do work great, especially in the cold, but they are pricey - about $10 for a 4-pack.

So most of us use Ni-MH rechargeables such as Eneloop or Amazon Basics. They're also about $10 for a 4-pack, don't quite get the advertised battery life, but because they're rechargeable, it's super economical in the long run.

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2 hours ago, Mineral2 said:

So most of us use Ni-MH rechargeables such as Eneloop or Amazon Basics. They're also about $10 for a 4-pack, don't quite get the advertised battery life, but because they're rechargeable, it's super economical in the long run.

What charger do you recommend?

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Most people here will recommend either a Maha or Lacrosse charger as they have programs to condition the batteries to keep their capacity going strong. I've been meaning to get one, but I'm currently using a high(er) end eneloop smart charger (BQ-CC55) that came with a set of batteries I bought.

Regardless, you want one that charges each cell individually (no pairs required) and has a smart shut-off mechanism so that you aren't accidentally over-charging your batteries.

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I do not remember exactly why, but I went with the Lacrosse, and it has served me well!

 

However, for my Garmin GPSr that can charge AA in the device, I have cut a small clear plastic rectangle from my microSD card blister packs and placed it between my batteries and the 'button' inside the battery tray, which allows me to charge them inside the GPSr - which means I almost never have to swap them out or charge them externally! And I can use higher capacity batteries than the 2000 mAh Garmin battery pack.

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while birdseye is not the nicest/fastest out there your issues are not something that i've encountered (and i've only been doing this for about 2 weeks since i bought my 66st).

 

- birdseye will throw up and flat out tell you if you've selected too large of an area.

- make sure you always have 'highest quality' export selected

- are you actually verifying that birdseye is of good quality before you even download it?  you can overlay it on an area as part of a free trial and zoom in a bunch of times and looka t the scale and see where it breaks down.  

- to have it go faster download it to basecamp without auto uploading to the device.  you can then push it to the device separately and i find that even though it's 2 steps it's much quicker in summary.

 

- you should really explore something like SasPlanet, if you have windows.  there are 2 steps that you'll have to make additionally (you'll find them in the instructions as you're searching for sasplanet) where you hack your 64 to accept external .jnx files.  you can then make infinitely more detailed satelite maps from many sournces, including google maps and drop them into your birdseye folder.

 

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