[OSM-talk] Good deal on Garmin GPS unit

[Christian van den Bosch]

Andy Armstrong wrote:
> On 5 Jul 2006, at 10:24, Dan Karran wrote:
>> - it's rather large compared to my eTrex (though it's relatively light)
> 
> Huge, innit? :)

Yeah. Definitely a bit on the large side, but surprisingly light for its 
size.

If you want the round serial/power connector, don't forget pfranc.com 
which has them available on a sharehardware/pledge scheme in many countries.

>> - it didn't manage to get a lock on 3 satellites whilst walking to
>> work, whereas I think my eTrex does... I should really have waited to
>> let it get a lock before walking, but I was late already  :)
> 
> Mine took nearly half an hour to get its head together - I thought it 
> was faulty. Eventually it worked where everything was and now it gets a 
> fix within < 1 min from power up and gets a +/- 4m 3d fix shortly 
> thereafter.

Mine got a +/-3m fix too which I was delighted with. It seems to see 
somewhat better signal strength than my old eTrex Vista, and it seems 
/much/ better at the whole WAAS/EGNOS thing.

>> - it's nice to have the mapping, base data for europe and ability to
>> search for places
> 
> Yup, good gazetteer - it's got places around here I've never heard of. 
> It doesn't have all the local roads though (I'm in the middle of 
> nowhere^h Cumbria in the UK).

As expected, the mapping data is crap for Ireland :/

Don't forget to turn off snap-to-road in map options, or any logs you 
get from it could be considered a derivative work of Garmin's maps.

Also, my unit came with firmware 3.50 - current version is 4.10, 
available at http://www.garmin.com/support/download_details.jsp?id=551 - 
looks like lots of worthwhile changes. Haven't tried it yet. YMMV.

Christian / cjb

http://www.cjb.ie/