IGO MICRO-NEWSLETTER 2008

MICRO ISSUE #01

Here is the very first IGO Micro-Newsletter! Parabola gives us a wonderful and detailed review of the new Garmin Colorado Series of GPS receivers and he's also written a follow up review addressing the firmware updates. We also have a new cacher profile and we also wanted to ask people to please share their photos by sending pictures to photos@iowageocachers.org

COLORADO 400t REVIEW
By Parabola

The Colorado Series:
I was so excited when I learned of the release of the "next gen" of GPSr's from Garmin just before the CES show took place last month. I started doing a lot of research on them to see the differences between models and what all the new features were going to be. I was lucky enough to find a beta tester for Garmin who was able to explain the differences between the new models and how they weren't really all that different. First I'll try and give you the details of the 4 different models of the Colorado series.
There's the Colorado 300 which is basically a base unit that only has a base map installed on it and it also has less built in memory storage for mapping software. The Colorado 400c which has the bigger memory capacity and is pre-loaded with the Blue chart costal maps from Garmin. The Colorado 400i which again has the bigger memory capacity and is pre-loaded with inland lake maps from Garmin. And finally, the one that I bought which is the Colorado 400t. It also has the bigger memory and is pre-loaded with TOPO maps for the entire U.S. They all have the same software and menu system, the only difference is the size of built in memory and pre-loaded maps.

I was so excited when I got one in my hands. I was able to get one of the first thousand that were made and when I opened the box and picked it up for the first time I noticed how comfortable it was to hold. I was just about drooling over the larger screen and jumped up to grab some batteries to power the bad boy up. It took me about ten minutes to figure out how to open the back to put in the batteries. The rear case is very hard to get off and I kind of had that fear I was pulling the whole thing apart instead of just removing the battery cover. I have since found out some people are putting a drop of lubricant on the inside edges of the cover which makes it much easier to remove in order to change the batteries. Once I got the batteries installed it was time to power it up and see the great looking screen. Right off the bat it acquired a signal within 12 seconds. Not too bad considering it had come from Seattle. Normally a GPSr takes more time to acquire a signal when it has been moved over a couple hundred miles without being turned on. As I made my way through the menu's, the new rock-n-roller wheel was great to get through all the menus, and their are a ton of menu's in the GUI (Graphical User Interface).

So far so good. I broke out the laptop and it was time to load a pocket query and see how the new paperless caching system worked. That's when I started noticing differences from the Garmin 60CSx that I am using at the moment. When I plug in the Colorado's USB cable, which it should be noted that the whole line of Colorado's has a USB 1.1 jack for connection to a PC or cigarette power supply, I got a new drive listed on my computer as if I just plugged in a thumb drive. Strange, but OK. When the Colorado is connected to a PC it goes into "USB mode" and on the screen it shows a message that it is connected to a computer. At that point I tried to change screens on the GPSr itself – nope, can't look at things while it's connected. So I logged on to www.geocaching.com and got a fresh query e-mailed to me. Loading the query into the Colorado is very easy and I really like how they are going about it. You have to unzip the query file and then open the drive that showed up when you plugged the GPSr into your computer. It will be labeled as F:/Garmin (note that the F would be different depending on how many hard drives or devices are on your computer). Open that drive and look though the folders until you see a geocaching folder and open that, then just drag and drop your pocket query file (GPX file) into the geocaching folder. That's it you're done. Then just hit the safely remove hardware (which I very very highly recommend doing) before unplugging from your computer. When you're all disconnected, the Colorado will turn itself off. This is so it can change back from USB mode to normal mode.

Now with 500 caches loaded in, I turned the unit back on and noticed that this time it took about 45 seconds to turn on and load the caches and acquire a signal. OK, that was a little weird, but still not too bad on starting time. One thing I have found out is when you have GPX files loaded into the memory and when the power is turned on it has to go through and parse every cache that's in the memory. So the more you have stored the longer it will take to boot up. So now I'm all ready to go with the GPSr loaded and looked at my map page on the Colorado to see just where the closest caches are. Nothing was showing up on the map. Kind of puzzled by this, so I started to toggle through the menu and found 'geocaching' mode and selected that and a list of the closest caches popped up. On that list was the name of the cache, an arrow pointing in the direction of the cache, and the distance to the cache. Then you roll the wheel until you get to the cache you want and hit the select button. That takes you back to the map showing you where that cache is. All that shows up on the map is just that one single cache but if you hit select again, it takes you to the cache info screen -- which is really cool. That screen has the difficulty and terrain, who placed the cache, information about the cache, and the last four logs posted on the cache which is really handy. So the paperless cache works pretty good. All the info right there in your GPSr. No need to have printouts or a palm or something else to view cache pages on the fly. The bad part was their is a delay when selecting the cache to when the cache info page would show up. The length of time that is take seems depend on how much you have loaded in the Colorado.

After toying around with it some more, I started noticing some really irritating things though, like the part of the caches not showing up on the map overlay. I can't scroll around and take a look to see and kind of plan a route on the fly to hit a few caches. That's not good. Since I do most of my caching on the fly I like to be able to look around on the map, so I can kind of plan which route I can take so I'm not driving in circles or doing a lot of back tracking. The less time I have to spend in the car the better.

It was time to take the Colorado 400t for a test run. I had the 400t and my 60CSx side by side the whole time to really compare the two and see how they tracked and signal strength. I was really surprised that the 60CSx got just as good of a signal as the 400t no matter where I was. I tried that out in some deep cover and while driving down the road. As I approached ground zero and the distance got down to 3 feet away, I looked up and right there was a pill bottle. So accuracy is great and never could find a problem with that.

I then noticed that I had the unit on for about an hour and a half and was getting a low battery warning. Those batteries were fresh when I tossed them in. I was using back light on at 100% the whole time and that can really drain them in less than 2 hours. This is one of the problems addressed by a firmware update that happened about 2 days after I got the 400t. It increased the battery life from around 2 hours to just over 6. It really didn't seem to matter what type of battery I was using. I did notice they they put in an auto backlight control for when your batteries are getting low the backlight will dim. After the first firmware and Chipset update was made available, I took it out for another run. They made some improvements mostly to the batteries and the backlighting that I could tell.

So at home I was playing around with it looking at all the different settings and what it was capable of doing and I thought, well it handles Groundspeak GPX files, so what about terracaching GPX files? I snagged some off the net and loaded those in and all I could get them to do was load as normal waypoints which gives you the location and who placed the cache. So this got me thinking and through some of the settings I was able to take the Groundspeak files and switch them to waypoints and they showed up on the map overlay. Again, when you scroll over to it and select it all you get is the location. I did notice when you do this if there are parking cords listed in a cache that's all that will show up on the map. The cache location still would show up. I did figure out a workaround for the terra GPX file. If I sent it through GSAK and then exported my own GPX file it would then show up in the list of geocaches. But this only worked about 50% of the time. Clyde from GSAK is trying to work on the export of GPX files to help this. I never did try a navicache file to see, but I assume that it would act the same as a terra file. I did find where, just before the first of the Colorado's were sent out, Groundspeak made a change to their GPX's files to work on the Colorado.

One of the neat feature's is screen shots. Say you're out hiking and took a neat route that you would like to take a picture of and keep it or send it off to some one. All you do is hold down a button for two seconds and that screen will be saved in the memory. Then when you connect to a computer their's a jpeg file of your screen shot. You can also upload jpeg's to the Colorado to use as a background image. I'm not sure if you have to size the picture down to fit or if it re-sizes the image itself. One of the things I didn't try.

The next day it was time to take it out for test number two. This time I took my wife with me so she could drive while so I was able to have the 400t and the 60CSx and really pay attention to them. In broad daylight I didn't need the backlighting at all and was able to see the screen very well. A big change from having it inside where I have to use the backlighting to see what's on the screen. I was using the 60CSx in geocaching mode and trying to use the 400t in geocaching mode. This is when I noticed that you can't enter the cache as found on the Colorado's, which got me thinking (and later confirmed) that you can't delete one cache without deleting all the caches from the Colorado's. You have to reinstall a new GPX to remove just one cache. This didn't matter if I loaded individual GPX files or one large GPX file. If I did them as individual files I could just delete the one file but I would have to hook it up to a computer to do so. While hunting caches though, the accuracy was about 3 feet better than the 60Sx at best. Most of the time they were about the same and after we found a few and returned home I took a long at mileage and elevation changes. I had reset all that info in both GPS's before we left and the Colorado was about half mile difference than what was on the 60CSx. The elevation changes where very close to each other. The compass was still the same as all other Garmin GPSr units where it's just a two axis compass that wants you to hold the GPSr level or it will eventually become confused and you'll have to spin around in circles to re-calibrate it. I was a bit disappointed with that since that's my only complaint with the 60CSx. I really would have thought Gamin would have put in a three axis compass. That can't be fixed via firmware update, that's a hardware update. The new wherigo player in the Colorado is cool. This whole new concept is really neat and I tried the sample cartridge and it worked great. The only down side is the Colorado's don't have a speaker just a piaso, so a cartridge dependent on audio won't work. If someone was creative with their audio and could make beeps in patterns and in different lengths of time you could make a song that would work, but it really should have some sort of speaker to fully play the wherigo game.

Next I was going to mark a location and noticed that there is no way to average a waypoint on the Colorado's. That's a huge step backwards. So to kind of wrap up this little review because I could make it about 20 pages long, I think the new Colorado's are nice GPSr's, but their's a lot of flaws in the geocaching mode. I think that the whole series was released before it was really ready to go out the door. It's only been out officially for a month and their are Colorado's with different types of chipset's already and that to me is a hint they ran into some limitation problems in the middle of the start of production. The rock-n-roller wheel is a great idea and it really speeds up looking through menus and is very easy to use. But the GUI on the Colorado's to me looks like it was made for a touch screen based type application and I work with lot's of different touchscreens and GUI's. You really have to dig through the menu's to get where you want or change a setting. Garmin has shown that they know their are problems and they're working on updates via firmware and chipset updates through their website. Some of us kind of got together and got a list of issues for people with Colorado's and Garmin has taken a copy of that, so it'll be interesting to see when they get all the bugs out. I know that on the top of their list is getting the geocaches to show up on the map overlays, which was my biggest complaint with it. But I also know a lot of people that use their GPSr's to run a mapping program on a laptop while out and about. You CANNOT do that with the Colorado series. Even a program like EnRoute won't work. I can't stress that part enough: when it is connected to a computer it's in USB flash mode and that's it. You can't use a computer to both power the GPSr and still use the GPSr. In fact there's even been a few problems plugging into a vehicle cigarette power plug with the GPSr's going into USB mode.

All in all when you're looking to buy a GPSr you need to look at what is going to fit best for you. You may not need one that has all the fancy extra's and want one that is just a basic unit. So if you're just getting started in the game and looking to make that first GPSr purchase, my advice to you would be to really do some on-line research and look up some user reviews. You can e-mail some of us cachers that have been around a little while with questions. The geocaching 101 and 201 events are a great place to start which have a lot of good information. But if you missed them, or couldn't make it, use the forums here at IGO, I don't think I've met anyone yet that would be unhappy to answer a question.

Here's a link to a page with lots of great information by other users of the Colorado's. And there was just another firmware and chipset update released a couple of days ago. So some of these problems I've talked about may be fixed or some new issues may arise.

So stay warm, and I see ya in the spring. I think the groundhog was right.

Please be sure to read Parabola's follow up review (below) where he addresses firmware updates and changes made to the GPSr.

Follow Up Colorado 400t Review
By Parabola

Fixes and updates with software V 2.4

Improved acquisition time in certain circumstances.
Improved power on time.
Improved backlight support.
Improved support for NiMH batteries.
Improved Wherigo player.
Added ability to show and review geocaches on the map.
Added ability to log geocaches as found.
Increased maximum geocache count to 2000.
Added support for BlueChart currents.
Added ability to view extended information for custom POI's.
Added ability for turn preview beep to reset the backlight timeout.
Corrected map to display road labels.
Corrected map to display small towns.
Corrected map to not change orientation when beginning pan mode.
Corrected metric nautical setting to display appropriate map scale.
Support for Colorado Field Notes, at geocaching.com.

The geocaching mode has come a long way with this update. It's usable now. They fixed the problem with caches not showing up on the maps, so you are now able to scroll around and look where the caches are at and that to me is essential for planning a cache route on the fly. For me, until this was fixed, I couldn't use the GPS the way I really wanted to. I work all over Iowa and I like to try a cache or two on my way home in the evening. And without that it made planning a route very difficult to do.

They have also improved the geocaching mode with not only the ability to mark a cache as found but you can mark it as not found, needs maintenance, or unattemped. You still cannot delete just one cache from your list yet though. Also, someone has written a macro for GSAK for Terra GPX files so they will work in geocaching mode.

The battery life is still not too good. They have added the selection of Lit ion to the list on the unit. At first your only selections were Alkaline or NiMH. In one day of caching it went through 2 sets of NiMH in around 9 hours. Keep in mind that's using the backlight some. Which makes a huge difference. But the weird thing is, you can take to batteries and put them into a 60CSx or etrex and the battery meter will show full. I would strongly suggest to invest in some rechargables and and keep a fresh set with you. It's a bad deal if you out in the woods and the GPS goes dead and you've been hiking all over the place. I think that's happened to just about every cacher I know.

They have also adjusted the maps to display a lot more road names and show smaller town names without having to scroll over and put you arrow on the dot of the small town and hit select to see what town that is.

The power on time is greatly improved but it all still depends on how many caches and POI's you have loaded. The more you have the slower it is to start. This also goes for searching cache information. The more caches you have loaded the longer it takes for the cache description to be displayed.

The other neat thing is they increased the number of caches you can have loaded - from 1000 to 2000. Which in my case is great. Again I work all over Iowa and like to have cache info for the areas that I'm in. This makes it so I don't have to have my laptop with me as much. I keep fresh pocket queries in my laptop so I can look at caches via GSAK and can load coords in a very short amount of time. But with the ability to hold more caches it means I have to haul around less gear. Which is a huge plus in my book.

I haven't tried or know anyone that has tried the field notes yet. To me it just takes too long to write out a sentence on the unit and the compasses are still having lots of problems. They have to be recalculated a lot and I really hope to see an update on that.

So far Garmin is getting on top of things and fixing some of the things that should have been there on day one, but they are listening to cachers and getting opinions from people that are using them, not just beta testers. This last update shows that they know about the bugs and are working hard to get those updates out there for us. These fixes take some time to write and test so I wouldn't think they will be able to have another update for a month or so. Every update has the potential to also add new bugs. Be patient, and the line of the Colorado's are heading in the direction of what we would expect from this price range of a GPSr. Also I would like to note that Garmin has said this is not a replacement for the 60 series. Keep your fingers crossed and hopefully winter will be over here real soon. I think we're in for a real muddy spring. At least on the eastern side of the state. I'm not sure about the western side. I know a lot of us are sick of the snow and going stir crazy sitting around the house. But those nice spring days are just around the corner.

Cacher Profile

GC.com Username: ParrottheadCBP

What is your username and how long have you been caching? I am ParrottheadCBP. The name comes from my 20+ year adoration of Jimmy Buffett. I have been caching since 2003, when I was introduced to geocaching by friends in St Louis who found out about it from friends there too. Our first find was at a park north of St Louis. We had a nice hike to find the cache near a lovely overlook of Cuivre River valley, cleverly hidden within a limestone bluff. That was quite fun, and easy enough. BUT who thought to mark the parking lot!! (The GPSr didn’t have the retracking feature, or we didn’t know enough about it be able to use it.) So, we took a horse trail, climbing over deep ruts and mud holes, took a right turn, and another right turn, and ended up on a road about 30 feet down from the cache site! Boy did we have a big laugh at ourselves! From then on, the funny line was “We can’t be lost—we have a GPS!”

Favorite cache/why? My favorite caches have been at county and state parks in Door County Wisconsin. If it hadn’t been for geocaching, I may not have ever seen the county parks. Those don’t hit the tourist brochures. That is what I love most about geocaching. Some of the greatest wonders to see in the world are home to geocaches.
My favorite caches are less than 3 stars, and have no Sudoku puzzles, or algebraic equations. I don’t need to go on a death march to find a cache, and I really don’t care to solve puzzles to find them either. I may consider a 2-3 part cache, but keep your multi-multi caches!

I haven’t seen a geocoin. They sound cool. I am pretty out of it that way. Too slow for First to Finds.

I have done quite a bit of caching in Southeast Missouri, where I used to live. The Door County trip was another favorite. I am 1 for 2 in Louisiana. So Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa are my other states to have found caches in. Oh, yeah, I have a find or 2 in Tennessee too! Almost forgot!

How do you prepare for a full day of geocaching? Preparing for a caching expedition starts with looking at all the caches around where I want to go and then printing off the sheets. Maybe when I am rich and famous I can get a GPSr that is high tech enough to upload the info into. So, for now, I will then enter all the coordinates before I leave. When I get where I am going, I will always find that I have entered coordinates for a parking lot, and have to read the cache description for the real coordinates. Hate when I do that. I am going to Fort Myers Beach, FL next month, and plan to look for a few caches there. I can’t wait. Give me sand in my shoes!! Keep the alligators away! Watch for the manatees!

Please send your stories, ideas, questions, cacher profiles, etc to newsletter@iowageocachers.org.

If you would like to see your geocaching photos on the IGO website and/or published in the IGO Newsletter please send them to photos@iowageocachers.org.

Look for the next IGO Newsletter coming soon!