GPSrChive Discussion Forum

I have been hiking for 7 weeks in the Spanish Pyrenees with my Oregon 700 (firmware v3.30), a brief report how it performed:

• I used the 700 in Classic mode with the latest OSM based Topo Spain/Portugal (Freizeitkarte 1707) and Topo Spain v6).
• I used it as simple as it can be, no track recording, just checking my location on the map during the day for many times.
• Normally I would leave the untit turned on for 10-12 hours with the screen turned off. Batteries were charged with a small solar panel (Silva Solar I) on top of my bacpack, only solar power for 7 weeks!
• I also marked some 100 waypoints.

My observations:

• Overall the 700 appeared to be very reliable and it replaced my paper maps and compass for 95%.
• The only spontaneous crash I had was when I was autorouting with City Navigator but that was no surprise for me as this happens at home too occasionally.
• Battery life is not great (Eneloop 1900mAh), I never use backlight and even with the screen turned off I could use it for max 12 hours. I know the Eneloop 2500 will last a bit longer.
• Somtimes, after changing batteries, the 700 re-indexes all maps and turns on all of them. If this happens I would have to turn off all maps I don't use again (some are overlapping the same area).
• Sometimes (it occured about 10 times in 7 weeks) after turning the GPS on and getting a good fix (accuracy 3m) the Location Pointer on the map appeared to be frozen on it's location and direction. Turning the GPS Off/On would solve this. Lock on road is always turned off but even with this option enabled the pointer would move. I never had this issue before at home!
• I prefer Classic Mode but the Red Pin you get when touching the screen is very annoying! On option to turn it off permanently would be a huge relief Garmin!
• getting a cold fix in the mountains often took very long! On many occasions it took 1-2 minutes to get a fix, even with no high/steep mountains nearby it often took very long. Even a warm fix took much longer than I expected. The 700 is not getting a fix faster than my old 600.
  I used GPS and also tried GPS+GLONASS but didn't see any differences in fix-time or accuracy. WAAS/EGNOS was off since this is of no use in the mountains.

The option to turn off the red pin is simple.
On top there is an info area.
In that info area there is a grey 'X', just touch that 'X'

That's not what I meant.
When zooming in/out and panning the screen you always get the red pin if you don't do this very accurately. I constantly get this pin when I don't want it and every time I have to disable it again, very annoying!
I would like to have the option to totally disable the red pin.

Option to disable red pin on map screen added to Feature Requests.

Thank you for your excellent report. It sounds like you had more fun for those 7 weeks than most of us did!

gpsrchive wrote: ↑Sun Oct 29, 2017 4:28 am It sounds like you had more fun for those 7 weeks than most of us did!

I use Garmin handhelds for more than 15 years now and I am well aware of all sorts of problems that one can experience with them. During this trip I used my 700 in the most basic mode that's possible and I think that's important to realise in relation to reliability. 90% of all 'modern' possibilities that are built in I didn't use! It was the first time in my hiking-life that I left all those paper maps and my compass at home!

I added one more point to my list of observations:

• getting a cold fix in the mountains often took very long! On many occasions it took 1-2 minutes to get a fix, even with no high/steep mountains nearby it often took very long. Even a warm fix took much longer than I expected. The 700 is not getting a fix faster than my old 600.
  I used GPS and also tried GPS+GLONASS but didn't see any differences in fix-time or accuracy. WAAS/EGNOS was off since this is of no use in the mountains.