Alternative to Garmin

[+jonny the fox]

Ive had two Garmin devices over the last ten years. The first one was a GPSMAP and the lastest was an Oregon 550. Both have failed the same way. (see attached photos of the Oregon) The rubber on/off button perished and eventually fell to bits exposing the microswitch inside. Ive not had it outside since I realised how exposed the electronics were and ive just sent an email to garmin asking if its fixable.

Are there any decent alternatives to Garmin devices? I know they have a good name, but I just want to know what else people have used and not had any problems with.

[+Mausebiber]

Keine Alternative aber eine Lösung deines Problems:

 

https://www.lucian-bergmann.de/reparatur/

 

[+Viajero Perdido]

Search AliExpress for "rugged android".  I'm quite happy with my Blackview phone, built like a tank.

Bonus: with a phone, you get a choice of caching apps; Garmin just has the one.

[+and1969]

3 hours ago, Mausebiber said:

Keine Alternative aber eine Lösung deines Problems:

 

https://www.lucian-bergmann.de/reparatur/

 

Yes, I have seen earlier threads where people have mentioned replacement 3-D printed buttons. I have repaired other devices myself by scavenging keys from keypads off old remote controls or giveaway pocket calculators. If possible choose a button the same size that has plenty of surrounding flat rubber.

My current devices are an android phone, or a Garmin Nuvi 1310 satnav. (Found a cache today with the 1310 but it had dozens of woodlice on it so I will return in a few weeks time when hopefully they should have gone wherever they go for the winter.) As for the 1310 on off button I have been gentle with this for a while as it seems fragile and unlike a handheld GPS it is not expected to be used regularly in normal car navigation use.

[+ChriBli]

My advice is to fix it. Buying something newer will only disappoint you. All devices will have their weaknesses, but the older ones were not built to break to the same degree. I'm using a Garmin Nüvi 200, the single most durable piece of electronics I have ever owned. The amount of punishment it has been subjected to would have destroyed anything else. It has one flaw, the USB connector (used for charging) comes loose after a few years of daily use. When that happened, I bought a second-hand identical replacement unit for $10 and used that until it developed the same problem, then I repaired the original one and have been using it ever since.

[+Atlas Cached]

To answer the actual question asked, no, there is no current direct competitor to Garmin Outdoor Handheld GPSr. They have destroyed all competitors.

 

My first Garmin was also an Oregon x00. Then an Oregon x50. Both served me well, but I personally find no joy in using old technology, so I update to newer models quite frequently.

 

In my opinion, there was never a more capable and greater value for the money geocaching GPSr than the Oregon 7x0. Still available as New old stock or refurbished from multiple sources. 

 

Other Garmin models offer additional features and capabilities, but the Oregon 7x0 is still an excellent solution for those who desire a rugged geocaching GPSr, not a phone.

 

See GPSrChive for more details.

[+RecipeForDisaster]

I put specifically made silicone sleeves on both of the units I use. The eTrex has the same problem with the skin and buttons, so I put a piece of eraser in to take the place of one missing button, and covered it in electrical tape. Then, with the silicone skin over it (these are less than $10 online), it looks pretty normal. The GPSMAP 66s has had its silicone sleeve on since it was pretty new, so I’m hoping I avoid the same fate for that one. 

[Oneily88]

On 10/16/2022 at 8:55 AM, Atlas Cached said:

To answer the actual question asked, no, there is no current direct competitor to Garmin Outdoor Handheld GPSr. They have destroyed all competitors.

 

My first Garmin was also an Oregon x00. Then an Oregon x50. Both served me well, but I personally find no joy in using old technology, so I update to newer models quite frequently.

 

In my opinion, there was never a more capable and greater value for the money geocaching GPSr than the Oregon 7x0. Still available as New old stock or refurbished from multiple sources. 

 

Other Garmin models offer additional features and capabilities, but the Oregon 7x0 is still an excellent solution for those who desire a rugged geocaching GPSr, not a phone. 

 

See GPSrChive for more details.
Yeah exactly. Either pushed competitors out of business or bought them. Oregon 7x0 was one of the best "bang for the buck" GPSr ever(was my first one too), remember my dad buying it for me before my first deer season(along with gun cleaning kits  https://gritroutdoors.com/hunting/hunting-tools-accessories/cleaning-tools/ and other stuff)

Yeah exactly. Either pushed competitors out of business or bought them. Oregon 7x0 was one of the best "bang for the buck" GPSr ever(was my first one too)

Edited October 28, 2022 by Oneily88
typo

[+Mineral2]

On 10/16/2022 at 12:55 AM, Atlas Cached said:

To answer the actual question asked, no, there is no current direct competitor to Garmin Outdoor Handheld GPSr. They have destroyed all competitors.

This. Right here.

I'm still using my Oregon 600, but the rubber has formed a tear by the user button (not the power button) and I have to make sure I press it at the right angle or the plastic pin will pop off the button and I have to use tweezers to get it back in place. I'm patiently waiting for Garmin to update the Oregon line so I can have a more updated touch screen handheld. I guess I can search for an Oregon 700 since it's unclear whether Garmin is going to continue the line, or even continue developing its handheld GPS lineup at all.
 

Honestly, I find myself geocaching by phone these days and just using the Garmin for hiking/backpacking/backcountry adventure trips.  Phone apps work just as well, if not better, and I can run and download PQs for offline storage on a whim if I'm going out of cell service. I just don't turn the Garmin on very much these days. But I'm also not ready to throw it away either.

[robertlipe]

>  I find myself geocaching by phone these days 

I think you've hit the market summary spot on. They're in a tough spot. Look at their product line and you can see a hole and some rollup opportunities. 
Etrex: small and large. $100 and $200 are good price points.
GPSMap: separate product entries at $300, $350, and $400 - each with submodels of different sensors, mapping options is too crowded. Clean house. A BME280 and a HMC5883L combined are under a buck in quantity.  Does a camera make sense in these at all, especially at $100 when the sensors are < $3. Volumes for the multi-SV chipsets and antennas have driven the price to nearly the same as the GPS-only solutions. Printing and stocking different SKUs with training sales and support people (bwaaahahaha ) costs more than that. Fold all the 64, 65, and 66 devices together into one model. Remove Topo as a SKU and make it a download. Rhino and Montana are niche products at best. I just can't imagine that people are buying $800 Montana 750is.

Make Spot a separate unit that connects to the phone for a keyboard and location. Just don't even put it in the GPS. Just like the camera, that's on a different upgrade cadence than the core GPS tech.

New volume lineup: eTtex small $100 and large $200. GPSMap touch or dpad at $350. (Ask if we really need three different UX's with click-stick, dpad, and touch at all...) Hire a team to fix the problems that have been in these things for >10 years. The self-destructing buttons, switches, and rubber band problems are just not funny any more. Hire a usability engineer to count the number of button presses to street/foot navigate for a day of power geocaching, then go fix the UI. Read AC's list of long-standing bugs in the firmware and actually fix them. Crashing on certain PQs has been with us since Colorado.  Make a legit sustaining engineering group to fix and support these things

Last time I picked up a eTrex, the performance was just torture. When we had 8Mhz Dragonballs, I understood why keypresses lagged by a second. Modern multi-core RISC-V and ARM parts with a good peripheral set and good power management are, again, about a buck in quantity. Quit using parts that just make the hardware so laggy to save pennies.

But you've exactly called out the elephant in the room. All, but particularly the entry level devices, have to be feeling the pressure from phones. As long as your touch screen device is $600, it's really hard to justify one instead of the touch screen you already own. That really leaves their island between those two points: hyper rugged (compared to a phone) hardware. They'll never be able to compete with the volume economies of Samsung or Apple - heck, probably not even Oppo or OnePlus.

I think there's space for them to survive with geocaching-capable devices inside the larger "outdoor" class of devices, but I suspect the $500 touch screen Oregons are so indistinguishable in the minds of consumers from a phone (that the already have) in an otterbox that we just won't be seeing more of those. Instead of trying to shove everything into every device, consider your handheld "power geocacher" unit using BT to pair with your Drive so the cache you just marked found disappears from the map and your next (auto-routed) GOTO is the navigation target. Quit trying to solve driving directions on a 2.4" screen and an AA battery budget for some users.

They used to have 20 Nuvis and then mobile phones happened. Now just have models at 5", 6", 7", and 8", I think it's time for some tough love in their outdoor line to clean the models up and lock them down into a sustainable maintenance mode product line. In that product line, like their fitness devices, external competition forced them to clean up. In handheld GPS, their hand isn't forced, but they can't coast with this product line forever. 


If I were King, things would be a lot different here... 

I'm just not sure we need an Oregon 800 at $500.
 

[+GOT GPS?]

On 10/15/2022 at 12:16 PM, jonny the fox said:

Ive had two Garmin devices over the last ten years. The first one was a GPSMAP and the lastest was an Oregon 550. Both have failed the same way. (see attached photos of the Oregon) The rubber on/off button perished and eventually fell to bits exposing the microswitch inside. Ive not had it outside since I realised how exposed the electronics were and ive just sent an email to garmin asking if its fixable.

Are there any decent alternatives to Garmin devices? I know they have a good name, but I just want to know what else people have used and not had any problems with.

Had the same issue today. Picked up the Montana to find the button missing. When I set it down prior, it was ok. 

[tr_s]

Owner / prior owner of:

eTrex Original, eTrex Legend, eTrex H, eTrex 30.

They have all failed in this way. Button ripped off suddenly after ca 1,5-2 years of light to medium use. It seemed the rubber gave up or dried out. Garmin sent a new gasket for free for the first eTrex which eventually failed too. After the eTrex 30 (2012), along with its horrible software which was at the time not anywhere near production quality for even recreational navigational equipment, I said enough is enough and didn't send a dollar more to Garmin.

 

I since that time use only water-resistant (IP67+) Android smartphones with apps fit for navigation (Topo GPS, Topo Maps, Osmand). Mostly Samsung models. Superior in every aspect other than not having an always-on and transreflective display.

[+luvvinbird]

You might check out the new eTrex SE. MULTI-GNSS, Geocaching Live, digital compass, and more plus a very low price.

[robertlipe]

For those of us that have been in this sport (and this forum) forever and watched the long-term trends, it's interesting to have watched the tides come and go on this one.

In the first 5+ years, we see a growth of the GPS business in general, rich competition, models with interesting new features each year, models that didn't feel like spray-painted versions of each other, etc.

~2007: You think I'm taking a ~$600 slab of glass into the woods without reception and risk water damage? Are you mental? My GPSes are WAY more rugged, get better reception, and have a battery that lasts more than 4 hours.

5 years pass. The advantages of a Q-H antenna are negated by better correlators in newer GPS receiver chipsets made possible by economies of massive scale. The digital bits are better at finding the signal noise in the space haystack that changes to the RF/Analog side become relatively insignificant. You can finally start to type logs in the field and synchronize them later.

5 more years pass. Phones get Gorilla glass, carrying cases, 2 and 3 day battery life, offline support, etc. really gets good. Now Garmin builds an outdoor unit that works in the daylight. 

 

5 more years pass. Having had no competition in handheld GPS for many years now, many components of Garmins - including relative price, customer service, many terrible user interface choices, and that stupid rubber band failure - remain unchanged since geocaching first became possible in 2000.

2022 (Paraphrased as we've now seen more than a few people make the same post that @tr_s just did. "My four tenured Garmins physically worse out and all failed identically. I'm totally OVER Garmin.Go, team Cell Phone!"
[b]2023 "Buy a the black&white  eTrex with the yellow screen."[/b]

That last entry is really a twist I didn't see coming while living through epochs of posters coming and going through the years.

 

[+gpsblake]

You hit it on the head. Of all my Garmin's GPSrs that I still have and were used, only the original Etrex buttons still hold up perfectly, even though you had to use the buttons a lot, lot more back then to put in coordinates manually one by one. My GPSMAP 62 and Oregon 600 now have pencil erasers jammed into the unit where the buttons used to be. 

 

You've inspired me to take the old yellow Etrex out of storage and try to find some caches with it in 2023. 

[+Atlas Cached]

If you enjoy using your legacy yellow eTrex, I suspect you would very much enjoy a new eTrex SE.

[robertlipe]

Oh, man. Egged on by Atlas Cached, I was looking at the reviews on Amazon. Looks like I missed one cheap shot. This cannot stand!

Looks like they kept this much loved feature present in all of their devices since about the 60C or so. Quoting a geocacher from an Amazon Review titled "returned it":

"the device regularly froze up on me, and when frozen, the only fix was to remove the batteries and start over."

People LOVE that feature!

Dear Garmin. Wrap the code in an exception handler, add a watchdog timer. Have the code regularly checkpoint its current state, such as "actively navigating to and viewing the cache page of GC1234". Now, when either of those "oh, we can't really find the bug, but Something Bad happened" cases trigger, the device will reset. Upon reset, skip anything that takes more than a tenth of a second and longjmp directly to restore that state. If you do this well enough (I won't name names...but doing this FAST is the key) users may not even notice that their device just crashed; only that it glitched for a second or so. Of course it goes without saying that you should collect anonymized crash records that remove PII and offer to submit them for analysis, actually analyze them, and then produce and distribute fixes.

Sure, keep a count and if it happens, say, three times in a minute or something crazy, just give up because you have a bug that's bad enough to have to actually fix or a user with broken RAM or a cracked solder joints or something intermittent and continuing to reset isn't going to change that.

[+Atlas Cached]

I have two eTrex SE and neither of them freeze or lock-up for me. They are a wonderful combination of simplicity with modern features that is very enjoyable to use.

 

People really shouldn't review products they have never handled or used themselves, Robert. 

[+luvvinbird]

5 hours ago, Atlas Cached said:

I have two eTrex SE and neither of them freeze or lock-up for me. They are a wonderful combination of simplicity with modern features that is very enjoyable to use.

 

People really shouldn't review products they have never handled or used themselves, Robert. 

I couldn't agree more. The eTrex SE is an accurate, affordable and (so far) bug free receiver that I really enjoy using. My 66sr and 65s are getting dusty...and jealous, lol.

[+kunarion]

3 hours ago, luvvinbird said:

I couldn't agree more. The eTrex SE is an accurate, affordable and (so far) bug free receiver that I really enjoy using. My 66sr and 65s are getting dusty...and jealous, lol.

 

I've had a succession of Garmin Oregons. Big, bulky, with their slowly petrifying rubber switch cover. I have a case for it, so it doesn't get banged up. And a case for the case. It does everything, it has every feature ever. It can cook a meal for an entire family. It can navigate around the Horn Of Africa whenever you like.

 

And when I'm caching with buddies, I open my case and get out the case and open it and start poking around in the Garmin Oregon menus... when someone pulls an Etrex out of their pocket and goes and finds a cache just fine. Whoa, it just fits in your pocket like that?! Huh. 

 

Edited July 8, 2023 by kunarion

[+kunarion]

On 6/12/2023 at 11:45 AM, GOT GPS? said:

Had the same issue today. Picked up the Montana to find the button missing. When I set it down prior, it was ok. 

 

I wonder if something like Sugru would be suitable as a weather-proof repair.  Or most any thick, moldable silicon rubber sealant.  You can gently form it and spread it, and make it look presentable by using a fingertip dipped on soapy water.  Maybe start with a pencil eraser or other more stiff object that will transfer the actual button press.  Then covered it with the rubber sealer.  I don't know how many "presses" you get out of any particular sealer.  Seems like something that will need to be repaired again sometime.  But maybe it's OK.

 

[+BAMBOOZLE]

Garmin case failures are legendary....sweaty hands destroy the 62+ cases and not just the button cover, they look like they have been dragged through the briars.

Put something in the button hole then guerilla tape on top ( the tape can be used in other areas as well.

For some years I have been using the GPSMAP 78S for caching.....wonderful case and about as accurate as a quad ( of course they quit making it but I grabbed a good second one on ebay )

I still use my 62S and 64S but not as much.

[+Mineral2]

My Oregon 600 now has rips over both buttons, and the user button is getting worse. So I'll be looking at options to keep it watertight as I use it on the water. I wish Garmin would update the Oregon line, or give us another touch screen model smaller than the Montana but larger than the eTrex touch.