The improvements over the old model seem to be:
* WAAS/EGNOS.
Not useful in UK yet.
* 20 routes instead of one.
Very useful. In fact I'd like 50, but I'll put up with 20. Couldn't
abide only having one.
* New configurable trip parameters page.
This is *very* nice. Five fields which can select from a few dozen
interesting numbers. Reduces hugely all that annoying button clicking
you had to do to wander around the menus finding OS grid co-ordinates
here, ETE to final route destination there, etc..
* Hunting and fishing "good times", which include a display of
sunrise, sunset, moorise, moonset, and moon phase, for a specific
waypoint, at a specified date, default to today's date, but can be
edited. Means you don't need to have web access to find out the time
of sunset on Ben Nevis next month, and whether there'll be a good moon
if you take too long :-)
* 10,000 trackpoints in the tracklog.
Aaaahhhhh, lovely :-)
Tracking can be turned on and off. Very nice, means you can use it to
navigate back home in the car without risking an overwrite of the
interesting mountain active track, and start and stop tracks cleanly.
You can also turn wrap off, when it stops recording when the track
buffer is full. Tracking mode can also be set for time intervals,
distance intervals, or five different resolutions of auto. The highest
resolution of auto gives a more detailed and more accurate track than
the tracking mode of my old and good model of Summit, and looks as
though it should take about 17 hours to fill the tracklog.
[Good model of Summit? Seems there was quite a bit of sample variation
in eTrexes. Mine appeared to perform so much better under heavy tree
cover etc. than other users reported their eTrexes did that in
discussions of this we agreed that the difference couldn't just be
because they were idiots, like the man I met who held his with his
thumb over the aerial :-)]
Compared to a known good tracking model of Summit it seems to have the
same sensitivity and ability to find and keep lock, but is more
sensible about how it recovers from lost lock, producing fewer and
less extreme jagged track artefacts in lossy conditions. The detail is
significantly better at highest auto resolution, producing nice
hexagonal approximations to small circles which the Summit renders as
jagged and highly irregular quadrilaterals.
* Improved battery life. They claim 16 hrs normal use for the new one,
which seems probable given that with new batteries it takes a third
less power (which will extend life a lot more than by a third).
And of course it now has plenty of code headroom for further software
enhancements and bug fixes. (Mine is software version 3.20. 3.30 is
now up on the Garmin web site.) There's still some nice things the
Geko 201 does which this doesn't, such as pan over the track, but it's
now a good alternative to the Geko, as opposed to being an outdated
precursor. Especially at its price!
Shame they didn't take the opportunity to update simulator (aka DEMO)
mode. The only difference appears to be that you can now switch
tracking on and off in DEMO mode. A useful tip for these crippled
constant-speed eTrex simulators is that they run at a speed of 20
things, where things is whatever distance units were in place when you
started DEMO mode. Nautical is nearly twice as fast as metric.
AFAIK there's nothing in the appearance or packaging to indicate the
difference between old and new models. You have to switch it on. On
the "system" menu it shows a choice of WAAS and a software version of
3 or more.
There's a similarly upgraded Summit. Be interesting to see what effect
these have on Geko prices, since they make the Gekos look rather
expensive now.
At an entry level price this is now a pretty sophisticated
GPSR. Although it lacks the interesting and occasionally useful
altimeter and compass of my old Summit, the trip parameter page, the
much larger and much more controllable tracklog, and the improved
battery life, mean that it'll usually replace my Summit in my
pocket. The Summit will get used as an altimeter and barometer.
--
Chris Malcolm [email hidden] +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]
--
Chris Malcolm [email hidden] +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]