Garmin 32X question

[+GrateBear]

For those who use this product, how do you like it?  How is the City Navigator map function?  My Oregon 450 is failing (the clip that holds the City Navigator no longer locks in place so no map shows) and I have no interest in paying $600 for a Montana unit. I’ve thought about buying a used 450, but am not really comfortable doing that. Thanks. 

[robertlipe]

Duly noted that I'm not answering your actual question, but since this group is so quiet, I just thought I'd fill the empty space with something that _might_ be useful.

Years ago, Garmin offered a device trade-in program for units that were outside the repairability window, as the 450's surely are by now. They basically just offered a discount on a similar model or had some kind of flat repair price, which was essentially buying a refurbished unit... This program used to be easy to find and now isn't, so maybe it no longer exists, but I'd at least _try_ throwing myself upon the mercy of Garmin Support and seeing if there's any repair/upgrade option for you.

...particularly since it's probable that your electronics are all fine and the failure is either a bent piece of metal that's smaller than a can's pull tab or the piece of plastic that it mates to.

Back when Garmin had viable competition in the outdoor space and these things were simply easier to repair, these options were easy to find. The fact that they aren't makes me suspect that I may be remembering things from many years ago that no longer exist.

Barring that, check in with local geocaching clubs and see if anyone has orphaned an older model like this, either by upgrading or by reducing their involvement in the game that they would part with.

My own Oregon 450 is on 'permanent loan' for exactly those reasons, and I've given homes to much older models that became part of the GPSBabel test lab. In fact, the eTrex yellow I used for development has an unusably broken screen from being subjected to sudden deceleration into an oak tree upon a DNF. I just memorized the factory reset and proved I could send waypoints, routes, and tracks (maybe?) and could get them back. I didn't need a screen, and I didn't even need it to get a fix. I was just testing the ability to send and receive over the wire. 

[+Mineral2]

It's frustrating that Garmin has effectively killed their touch screen models. I certainly understand why you wouldn't want to carry a Montana around - those are big and bulky. and the latest iteration (700 series) is the largest it's ever been. I like the design and was really hoping for a redesigned Oregon to go with it, but.... nada. It seems that Garmin is focusing on its inReach devices and leaving us outdoor users to only the button interface or our cell phones.

Anyway... Instead of looking for a used Oregon 450, I would maybe give the 600 a try. Or the 700, though the interface change might be a bit fiddly. But when I upgraded to the 600, I had a hard time going back to my 450 which mostly sits in a drawer. The 600 is superior in almost every way: screen is better and more readable, the second customizable button makes getting to commonly used tasks a breeze, unlimited geocaches, the ability to pause your tracking instead of accumulating birds nests.... 

 

[+Atlas Cached]

I still believe the Oregon 7x0 is the best bang for the buck 'touchscreen' Geocaching GPSr available. 

 

They can still be found in good working order. 

[robertlipe]

I'm with you, Mineral2. The 600 was very much a "fixed" 450 to me. It was familiar, yet going back to the sluggish, resistive touch, limited UI model just felt like going back to CompuServ once you've seen the web. (OK, maybe not that much of a generation gap...)  By the time Oregon 7x0 hit, my time and physical ability to geocache were dwindling, so I got one to know it. Even my circle of local power-caching friends were happy enough with phones and the remaining signs of life in the 6 [2456] models, which I didn't care much for.

In fact, I bought my 600 (650?) more to implement GGZ support in GPSBabel than to use it myself. I actually implemented it and ran into a really hard fundamental problem involving counting byte counts for indexes. My tools (normally very helpfully) knew that "ā"  is one character but didn't provide a way to get to the actual offset of anything in BYTES, which is what we needed. I checked the code in, made a release or two, nobody even noticed it was there, let alone how broken it was, and I've since removed it from the source tree completely. Quit a contrast to the days of the 60C and especially two years later of the 60Cx, when probably ten people a day were asking/demanding for it. By even then, the world was moving to phones.

In the absence of competition and the high volume that geocachers used to have, we can expect Garmin's geocaching models to keep artificially high prices and limited choices. As chips and other components they've used get deprecated, the choices will shrink, leading to the problem highlighted by this post. This situation will likely only worsen. :-(

[+GrateBear]

On 1/6/2025 at 4:47 AM, Atlas Cached said:

I still believe the Oregon 7x0 is the best bang for the buck 'touchscreen' Geocaching GPSr available. 

 

They can still be found in good working order. 

I had a Oregon 700.  Did not like it at all.  I forget what the actual issue was, but It would constantly lose (I think) the map screen, and it took me forever to get it back.  

[+GrateBear]

On 1/4/2025 at 10:48 PM, robertlipe said:

Duly noted that I'm not answering your actual question, but since this group is so quiet, I just thought I'd fill the empty space with something that _might_ be useful.

Years ago, Garmin offered a device trade-in program for units that were outside the repairability window, as the 450's surely are by now. They basically just offered a discount on a similar model or had some kind of flat repair price, which was essentially buying a refurbished unit... This program used to be easy to find and now isn't, so maybe it no longer exists, but I'd at least _try_ throwing myself upon the mercy of Garmin Support and seeing if there's any repair/upgrade option for you.

...particularly since it's probable that your electronics are all fine and the failure is either a bent piece of metal that's smaller than a can's pull tab or the piece of plastic that it mates to.

Back when Garmin had viable competition in the outdoor space and these things were simply easier to repair, these options were easy to find. The fact that they aren't makes me suspect that I may be remembering things from many years ago that no longer exist.

Barring that, check in with local geocaching clubs and see if anyone has orphaned an older model like this, either by upgrading or by reducing their involvement in the game that they would part with.

My own Oregon 450 is on 'permanent loan' for exactly those reasons, and I've given homes to much older models that became part of the GPSBabel test lab. In fact, the eTrex yellow I used for development has an unusably broken screen from being subjected to sudden deceleration into an oak tree upon a DNF. I just memorized the factory reset and proved I could send waypoints, routes, and tracks (maybe?) and could get them back. I didn't need a screen, and I didn't even need it to get a fix. I was just testing the ability to send and receive over the wire. 

Thanks for your input.  True, that it's only the metal clip that holds the card in place.  The only other issue was the on/off button that disintegrated, but easy fix with a bit of pencil eraser and electical tape to hold it in.  I refuse to pay hundreds of dollars for a newer unit that you have to also buy city navigator maps, while one can buy a GPS for the car for under $200 and it comes with free lifetime maps.  

[robertlipe]

I'm with you on that, GrateBear. I think it was during the original 60C era when I realized I could buy a Nuvi with LMT (lifetime maps and traffic) for $89, or I could buy each year's map update for the 60x (which was a terrible driving GPS) for $89.99 for every GPS in my flock. So the car GPS stayed in the car, and the belt GPS stayed on my belt. It was a little frustrating that I couldn't mark caches as found on the car GPS, so during the walk back to the car, I'd pick which one was my next target and just pick "go" in the car, with zero attempt to keep the found/dnf list on the "big screen." But for a while, I'd keep the driving maps up to date every few years because the hiking GPS for the kind of hiking I usually did while geocaching didn't matter THAT much if they were up to date. I just needed to be on the right side of creeks and rivers, and sometimes it would be helpful to know if I saw a clearing if I was going to pop out of the woods onto a country road or into someone's backyard.

Before Nuvi, I actually ran a StreetPilot 2610 and, later, a 2710 in the car. It was huge, a couple of pounds, and literally the size of a paver brick. It took forever to boot, so I kept a battery-powered air compressor charging while I drove, but the StreetPilot was plugged into it like a UPS so it would stay on while I hunted.

I've had over a hundred GPSes for a while, so having two GPSes dedicated to geocaching was hardly crazy.

These days, even in the US, OpenStreetMap is viable to route on, and I'm happy to throw them some of that money instead. That was definitely not the case in those early days. Of course, when the carload of people is trying to decide where to eat or where to sleep, some subset of us are using our phones because even the $90 maps don't reflect last week's changes in hours or a road's temporary closure or all those other high-resolution details that we've all become so reliant upon while navigating these days. 

Back to your original question, it's the 2025 version of "What Garmin should I buy?" Let's go shopping! We slice the offerings into input: touch, dpad, or click-stick. (We raise an eyebrow that most of the 66 family is discontinued and the 65 brothers are pretty old in the lineup and a 67 without Inreach doesn't make any sense.) We want magnetic compasses because we're geocachers. Most of us don't' care about inreach, so cross those off. Montana is just huge and expensive (see the other thread in the group right now.) As a sidebar, the 22x for $200 sounds like a WAY better entry-level device than we had when you started the game (and way, way better than when I started a few years before you). Historically, the "S" has meant "Sensors" (as a practical matter, altimeter and compass and $50)  Looking at that table, the only difference in the 22x and the 32x that I see is the compass. Some PM didn't get the memo of how Garmin has worked for the last 20 years because it looks to me like those should be the 22 and the 22S, and they should be $199 and $249. But they didn't ask me. If you can get along with that little click stick, $299 isn't terrible. When I was power-caching, I found them physically painful to use for a day and really hard to use with gloves. That leads the 65S (2020-09), 66SR (2018-09), and 67 (2023-03). Must be that same PM because the 67 has the sensor kit. Why is it not the 67S? The 67 is the same price as the 66SR and is better in the very few places they're different. Given Garmin's attention span, I wouldn't expect a lot of updates from a 2018 model, but since they've been selling almost this same GPS since the 62 back in 2010 (sigh), maybe take comfort in stability (ha!) and not coasting. Personally, as a tech guy, I'd cross off 66. That leaves 32x@299, 65s@399, and 67@499. I won't go down the list model by model and feature by feature, but with the list culled, we have units that are $100 apart with feature sets that are about $100 apart (in Garmin dollars...not actual cost) in features. By chance, they happen to be broken into those three product categories that was the axis we defined in our first move: click-stick, dpad, and touch.

I don't know if this ball is still in play, but in the 200x era, Garmin would show some new geocaching-adjacent products in January at CES and some in February at some kind of an outdoor marketing convention. I don't know if they have anything up their sleeve for that aging 65 with Mini-USB (even older than Micro-USB, as Micro-B came around in 2007) and a screen that's even worse than the $199 model.

So from my coarse view (a technology guy that used to be a power-cacher and not a backpacker), the WiFi features and touch screen would probably push me personally to a 67. I just can't do click sticks, and the 65S just has enough of a musty smell about it that if I found a bargain on one, I might partake—the feature set is about on par with my O 600 that launched when the second Nexus 7 launched in mid 2013—but it's not like being UNable to update over WiFi would break me. The $299 and $399 models look like really solid units. The comparison table with all the empty entries for the 32x is designed to look scary, but even in my power-caching peak, there's nothing missing on the 32x that I'd pine over. (Be honest: with more than 2000 points on a map, it becomes a blur; searching and sorting is a nightmare, etc.) Especially since everything has removable SD cards now (hooray!) even if they had no management at all on the devices, I could take the SD card and, with a $10 adapter to my phone, launch a file browser and swap in the next leg of a trip even without a laptop.

The other two have completely valid points based on their collected experience, too. A used Oregon 6x0 or 7x0 would be feature-wise on par with that 65 or 66 or so (5K active waypoints, no WiFi), and they have an awesome capacitive touch screen that gives a nice experience to swipe, pinch zoom, touch type, etc. that your 400 or 450 would never do. Then again, touch screens are more prone to breakage, and they don't work worth a darn with gloves that aren't' made for them.

Unlike when you started, and a Vista had nothing in common with a V which was totally alien to users of a Venture, I'm pretty sure that most of the core code is shared between all of these things these days. It's not like the routing engine in one is going to be radically different than the other. They may be tuned differently (if hardware platform A has more memory and CPU chops to tear through more data, I might choose different limits or try more things than a more limited platform), and there's clearly a platform module that handles charging, screen layout, and interaction and input, but I'd bet there's some code DNA in these that goes back to Nuvi 350 or Colorado 400, their first model to read GPX files and really try to implement a geocaching model, so they've had some time to get the core straight. Sure, looking through Atlas Cache's FAQs and lists of bugs is probably worthwhile, but I doubt any of these are going to have deal-breaking terrible traits.

So that might sound anticlimactic, but that's how I'd break down the choices of today. I hate to do the Consumer Reports "you'll be happy with any of..." thing, but these things are so darned close to each other that your "best" choice comes down to a personal choice of budget and preference on ergonomics. Typing a log with a clickstick is about as painful as using a TV remote and just isn't very much fun for me. Maybe you don't care, as that's just not something you do, and that's OK.

I'll probably recycle some form of this rambling into a new version of the "What should I buy?" post at the top of this group. Thread in a bit of stuff about new phone apps and the realities that we no longer live in a Moto Droid/iPhone 3 world, and we can probably reduce the three threads a month we get in the group these days. :-)

Let us know what you eventually get and if you're happy with it. If you think I'm wrong about any of the above, feel free to educate me. I'm no longer immersed in this nearly as deeply as I was 20+ years ago.