The positives & Negatives of my Garmin GPS 60CSX

Dear fellow Garmin Fans,

Thought I would just give you my two pennys worth on the +- of my GPS
after cycling (bicycling)
France, from North East down to the South West & over the Pyrenees
1500km 16,000 altitude metres.

I would also be very interested to hear from any cyclists using this
device on their opinions.

1) Let me first give a big plus to the Garmin service staff who
replaced my device (on off button was defect)
without any fuss or charge even though it was over the guarantee
period.

2) The device very quickly navigated me through large towns, city's

3) The POI feature helped me out several times & was very accurate

4) At the end of the day it got me from A to B

5) The battery life was a good full 12 hours so with re-chargeables I
had no issues

They were the main plus points, the negative aspects (could be that I
made mistakes here)

1) Although I broke my route into 4-400 km bites with way points, it
could not always
calculate the routes fully & came up with "calculation error" which in
turn forced me
to use the "find City" feature, which it seems was the reason that I
lost the
ability to record my track points (great disappointment, still
gutted)

2) I am not sure what algorithms the device uses, but in calculating
the "fastest route" it certainly did not
take into consideration that I was on a bicycle(yes I had programmed
it in bicycle modus) on occasions sending me over hills that took
twice as long than if it had sent me around the thing.

3) The route that I planned so diligently in Mapsource was basically
ignored & re-calculated in the device

4) It seems to me again that in those algorithms if the device is in
bicycle modus then it automatically trys
to take you away where possible from the main roads & send you down
smaller back lanes, thats fine if
you out for a day's cycling maybe, but certainly not suitable when you
have a time limit & need to
cover distances quickly.

To conclude :
For such a trip, next time I will use a map & have my Garmin in as a
reserve which is a little bit
of an expensive back up :(

Simon

On 10/06/09 06:33, Simon wrote:

That is a _disaster_, not a disappointment :-((

I don't think track logging is connected to 'Find City', or indeed any
other part of routing. Why should it be?

I'd never seen 'calculation error' on mine, but I just got it to calculate
a very long route, and I got the message (it only made it 925 miles through
the route :-). It didn't turn the track logging off though.
Did you get any track from your trip? When did you notice that it wasn't
recording?

I googled and there are plenty of other folk who've seen 'calculation
error' - I guess it's either exceeding max turnpoints in a route, or just
running out of internal memory at some stage.


Hehe. I doubt it considers elevation changes at all!
There're many tags for road sections which allow the speeds to be
estimated, so in principle it _could_ allow for slow climbs and fast
descents, but I'd be amazed if the mapping took it into account.


The only way you can encourage it to go your way is to add waypoints to the
route, and experiment until it gets the hang of it.

There is (or maybe was, haven't tried it for a while) very annoying
"feature" that when you're travelling a route with many such waypoints, if
you ever get it to do a route recalculation (e.g. by going off-route and
causing an auto recalculation), it ignores all of the waypoints and
calculates a new route from here to the destination.

A.

Simon schrieb:
...

IIRC all track points are stored automatically in one gpx file per
day on the micro-SD memory card.

HTH

Reinhard

Correct, the receiver must be set up to do so, however.

Reinhard Zwirner wrote:

That is true only if the Log Track to Data Card check box is checked and
if there is a microSD in the receiver with some free space on it. By
default that feature is turned off and it is not even described in many
of the printed manuals.

Jack

--
Jack Erbes in Ellsworth, Maine, USA (jacker at midmaine dot com)
(also receiving email at jackerbes at roadrunner dot com)