Quick mini-review of eTrex SE

[kot7OpHyd]

I got a unit yesterday and upgraded it to the current firmware 3.51 and used it during the day yesterday. Location is Singapore.

• The display is a big plus on this receiver. The contents are clearly visible even in bright sunlight, with good contrast and it's easy to read information.
• Compared to GPSMAP in power saving mode, the display doesn't switch off with display timeout. It's always on which is a plus.
• New and charged standard model Eneloop NiMH cells were put into it. It had been left on with Satellites set to GPS overnight. Battery widget still shows full bars this morning even though the unit was showing the track it's currently navigating all night. This suggests exceptional battery life.
• At many times, when the unit is powered off, it appears to switch on automatically immediately. This appears to be a bug.
• The body of the unit is uncomfortable to hold due to a hard plastic and clunky shape with edges. It is grippy due to the rubber over the switches, but the GPSMAP in comparison is far more comfortable to hold and interact with.
• The GNSS fix takes time to reach higher accuracy. The highest accuracy I saw was 3m with multiple contellations, but it lost that accuracy with small movement. However, the actual location shown appears accurate. I am yet to check how the actual accuracy is when walking in the city environment with buildings and trees.
• The elevation shown is always incorrect. The true elevation is 50m, and it shows 90m-200m+. When it is at 200m, it doesn't resolve towards the true elevation. In comparison, the GPSMAP 65s's error is about 5%.
• The compass is, for the most part, slightly inaccurate. It is accurate to around +/- 5 degrees depending on how the device was moved into that heading. I re-caliberated it several times to check. Sometimes it shows wildly inaccurate readings such as South where East should be, and freezes sometimes (just the compass). I suspect this is happening when there's a change in GNSS fix.
• It expects GPX track names to use a specific set of characters (e.g., not too long names and no characters such as "@" in the track name). It first appears to convert tracks from .gpx files put into the NewFiles directory, into .fit files with the track name as filename + .fit, and then I assume it tries to move them into the Courses or Activities directory, but that operation fails and the files remain in the NewFiles directory. If they're named with simple names such as "A.fit" and put into the Courses or Activities directory, the unit doesn't finish booting. However, if the track names in the GPX files are cleaned up, it converts them and shows them in the Saved menu.
• The UI and physical button layout is unintuitive. It's uncomfortable to use this coming from a GPSMAP, but I'll put that down to personal preference, and not something bad about the device.
• I have not yet experienced any random restarts so far, and am watching out for them. It does have this irritating bug of automatically powering on immediately after poweroff.

The GPSMAP 65s retails for about 3 times the price, and doesn't have the same exceptional battery life as the eTrex SE, but even for the features that the eTrex SE implements, there's a big difference in accuracy, and performance to reach that level of accuracy, for various measurements. IMHO, while the eTrex SE is appealing on paper for what it can do, in practice, it does not appear to be accurate in data it shows. It has me questioning if I can rely on the data it shows. I'll use it some more and report back if its behaviour changes or improves.

The GPSMAP 65s is a much more comfortable device to hand-hold for long durations walking and hiking. That's my TLDR.

[luvvinbird]

I'm on my second eTrex SE now as the first one randomly shut down and restarted many times while navigating. This replacement unit has not done that so far but I had an annoying experience yesterday. I was geocaching and found myself in a group of pine trees looking for a well hidden container. No matter where I went from tree to tree, the receiver refused to count down below 19 feet. It appeared to be stuck at that number but I had used it without a problem on two prior geocaches just an hour before. Frustrated, I went back to the car and grabbed my eTrex 30x which I've used while travelling and it had no problem counting down to GZ. The cache owner prides himself on accurate numbers and within a few minutes the 30x had me right in front of the container. Maybe I should have stopped navigating on the SE and tried again, but I didn't. Maybe it was just a onetime thing. Overall, I like the feel and grip of it and I think the price is excellent for the features it has.

[RickN55]

Nothing beats the 65s for speed in reaching maximum accuracy when turned on (6feet.1.8m) not even the "newer" 67 models. Great chipset on the 65s! i was going to sell my 65s when I got my 67 but I've decided to keep it as I think it's a great piece of kit.

[kot7OpHyd]

There are several of these assertion failures reported in

Code: Select all

GARMIN/Debug/error_log.txt

in what appears to be text encoding conversion code:

Code: Select all

4201 (eTrex SE) SW ver: 351
Build Type: RELEASE
Commit:8bd4b7ede587c92d7e6406e182d6fd6489c24e36
ESN: 3442295470
10/18/23 18:45:42
Assert
m\abstraction\unicode\uni_cnvt.c line 1641
Stack frame PC, SP: 0x1618c7b5, 0x200095a0
Call Stack - SP at 0x200095a0:
	0x1618be45
	0x161d3cc9
	0x161d9103
	0x161d9833
	0x161da2a9
	0x161d1707
	0x161d3ec5
	0x161d9161
	0x161cbf71
	0x161cc0f1
	0x161d19cf
	0x161daf2b
	0x161cbd61
	0x161d3c15
	0x161d0dd1
	0x161d58df
	0x161d0e95
	0x161d13b5
	0x161cc0c7
	0x161cc6b1
	0x161cc72d
	0x160871d1
	0x160948bb
	0x16093ead
	0x16094dbb
	0x1606b8d7
	0x161d3cc9
	0x16094d75
	0x161d1eeb
	0x1606bb69
	0x1606bc97
	0x1606c1a1
Uptime: 10446497

I don't know if this code was executed when parsing GPX, or a more routine operation in the device itself. This has been reported to Garmin product support via email.

There are also event logs with other errors. I wonder why they've gone so long without publishing a firmware update to fix these errors. Surely they know about them already from others who are sending reports? Firmware release 3.51 was released in July 2023.

[kot7OpHyd]

Continuing on the mini-review, I am more impressed by this device after using it for a couple of days on walks outside.

• It seems to have a decent antenna. After power-on, even in covered locations with buildings and trees obstructing skies on many sides, it quickly acquires a fix of about 50m accuracy within ~10 seconds, and resolves to 3m within a minute. The accuracy in practice when walking is good. When checking recorded tracks on Google Earth (activity's .fit file converted to .kml using gpsbabel), the track is on the road I walked on, and is within the 3m claimed accuracy on the device. Though I haven't tried track recording when enclosed by tall buildings yet, I'm impressed by the tracking accuracy.
• To check waypoint limits, I created a single GPX file with 2000 waypoints and put that into "NewFiles" and started the device. Previously no waypoints were present on the device. After booting (which took about a minute as GPX parsing appears to be very slow), it showed the first 1000 waypoints from the GPX file in the Saved->Waypoints menu. This appears to match the overall 1000 waypoints advertised limit of the device. So by taking this "NewFiles" route, 1000 waypoints can be imported from GPX. (I wonder if waypoints disguised as geocaches can be used to workaround this limit.)
• Compass accuracy still has an error of few degrees. When using it after a day of power-off, it has to be re-calibrated to improve accuracy. This is not a big problem for me as long as I expect it. Even if the compass is off by a few degrees, in practice as we walk and move towards the target, it will show if the heading is off by much. Note that this is with magnetic north reference where the state of the GPS fix should not influence it, and the heading is the compass heading.

I will report back on track limits when importing from GPX files on another day.