Just say no to garmin!
Well I did what I thought was due diligence when I went shopping for a GPS for my motorcycle. The actual experience had no relationship to what I was expecting:
My first (of many) surprise was that for some reason my burning software would not make a backup copy of city navigator v7.0. If this disk is actually copy protected in some manner the folks at Garmin must be among the most anal retentive folks on the planet. I say this because I spent the next 3 hours licensing this software to function ONLY with my particular GPS serial number. So the software is useless to anyone as far as putting maps or data onto a GPS without purchasing a license. So what is the purpose of copy protecting the actual Software disk? I would not have bought the product had I thought that they would copy protect their software.
The next disappointment was that I could not put a decent amount of info on the included card and also how long it takes to create the map. The included card is 128 MB which according to people's posts and my intuition was plenty. WRONG! Just the state of FL was 80 MB. I see 512 mb cards for sale but no one seems to know what size of cards will work with the 76csx. Even if you do get a super sized card like this you are still going to have major headaches on any cross country romp. You had better bring along a laptop and the original CD.
The time to load a map will easily kill most laptop batteries. To do the 80 MB FL map my laptop must have crunched numbers for close to an hour. The actual data transfer of the map did not take all that long when this process finished. Less than 10 minutes as I recall.
I tried to browse the location that a friend was at in the Ocala National Forest. It turns out that Garmins expensive $130 road map was useless. If this is your only map you will cruise right by things such as national forests. Things are included on the cheapest low-end paper map are not on it. It IS on my $35 DeLorme Street Atlas USA.
I guess Garmin wants you to spend $230 on 2 maps and then buy a bigger data card ($) that won't really be big enough, and that is assuming the software doesn't lock up during the multiple hours it will take to format the map data for your GPS. Even then you will have to toggle back and forth between their City Navigator and topo maps to see what you may be missing.
When you map a waypoint the rendering hangs. To bypass this bug you go though all the pages and come back to the map page and it will be rendered correctly.
The bottom line is that if you do any long distance traveling you are going to have to spring for more memory, always have a working laptop (i.E. If the laptop fails so does your GPS system) and to make the most of your trip more than one of Garmins maps.
This is just the first 8 hours of owning this thing. I strongly suggest that you do your due diligence before you even think about handing over your hard earned cash.
I wish had.
Joe
Fort Myers, Florida
United States Minor Outlying Islands
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