GPS wierdnesses

[azdesertfather]

I'm wondering if anyone with a GPS knows why I had such a bad experience with one I borrowed yesterday. I'm in the market for buying one, and a friend allowed me to test his ... is was a Garmin eTrex.

I used it when hiking First Water to Battleship Mountain. The first 3.5 miles were fine, and then all of the sudden I looked down (maybe a minute later) and it said I had gone 17 miles, and that my max speed had jumped from 4mph to 47.1mph. I'm honestly not the Dash or Flash Gordon or anything. ;)

From that point on, the reliability of the data was spotty. It never developed a consistent trail from the hike, and on the way back some of the tracking back to the waypoints I created worked...and then others said weird things like 22 miles to the next waypoint that I knew was 1-3 miles away.

Was it just a defective device, or do just GPS's do that sometimes and I just had bad luck? I'm actually now looking into getting a Magellan Triton 500, but any help anyone could give me on this would be much appreciated!

[nonot]

If you have the multi-gig chip in your unit (mine is a 60csx) should not Mapsource download the holistic route without error?

In your/our 60CSx, the routes download to the memory in the Garmin unit and not to the optional purchase multi-gig chip in your unit. Th maps are what download to the optional purchase multi-gig chip. In the unit's memory section, our unit will store up to 20 tracks at 500pts each or less. The hassle for me is needing to split many of the HAZ tracks to 500pts sections before download to the unit as many of the default HAZ hiking tracks are much more than 500pts total. The Garmin Etrex Vista works the same way. Garmin fixed this problem in their new 62 series which replaced our 60CSx. Our GPSjoe, SUN_HIKER, and John9L own this new model with mega-gig internal memory.

Hank got to it before I did. If you use them as routes, then you have to cut them down to <500 pts before uploading them to your GPS. Maps go on the multi-gig card.

The newest Garmins do not have the 500 pt limit.