Why is BASECAMP so S-L-O-W?!

It's not just you! It's happening to others too. There are several threads on this forum on the same topic.

I suggest you contact Garmin support at 1 800 800 1020 (if you are in North America) and let them know about it.

The more people that contact support and log this problem, the higher priority the software developers will place upon fixing the problem.

I am not sure why this was moved...but in any case....what is being done? Is this what we should expect from garmin? I paid $30 for something I essentailly can not use? The above post is ESACTLY what I run into...stalls, no movement, frustration, regret....:confused:

Garmin, any plans? When?

At the moment I use both BaseCamp and MapSource, as well as Google Earth. Talk about efficiency! Google Earth to actually see the maps on the PC with any degree of efficiency, and MapSource to do the actual planning and plotting of routes. Even though I don't experience the severe problems that other people do, BaseCamp is still pretty much useless except for loading BirdEye maps to the GPSr. Nothing that I couldn't accomplish with 3rd party software. But since I'm paying for the subscription, I subject myself to this punishment as a reminder not to make impulse purchases in the future.

Slow, sluggish, no prompts

I got Basecamp because I wanted to try Birdseye on my new Oregon 550. I paid the $30 for the subscription but the experience I am getting is not a good one.

I have installed the software on two different machines and am experiencing the exact same kind of issues on either machine. I'm not going to give out specs because they are relatively newer machines with lots of RAM and a ton of CPU power so this software should not be an issue.

Problems I am having. Here we go:

- The software is SLOW to start. It takes a good 30 seconds for the software to even boot up, whether my GPS is connected or not.

- Switching from one Birdseye map to another is horribly slow. Long pauses, and even a right click on one of my Birdseye collections takes 10 seconds to open up.

- If I want to select an area for Birdseye, as soon as I select and continue on in the process, it can be 30-120 seconds before I see the prompt that the download has started.

- Download speeds are horrible so I left my home computer on all night to download the map of my area and Basecamp just hung sometime in the middle of the night. Fortunately I rebooted the machine, hit resume, and it continued. This is not acceptable.

- Everytime I connect my GPS to my computer with BC open, I get an error telling me it can't read userdata.gpx off my GPS. The unit is not even a week old yet but somehow BC seems to think there is a problem? Uhm, no.

- I have no idea when BE maps have been sent to my GPS. I can right click and say send but I never get a prompt or anything telling me that it has completed. In any instance where I have downloaded a large area (300MB) and "sent" it to my GPS, I let it sit for an hour or so and still no message. The first time, I unplugged my GPS, turned it on and got an error about an invalid Birdseye file but the map was still there. Same thing happened this morning. Why is it I can't get the images on there without an error? I am getting maps but I am getting errors too.

- VERY unhappy with the actual maps for my area. What I get out of Google Earth is far better than what I am seeing from BE. The area above my house can't even be seen because of cloud cover.

For $30, I suppose I can't complain about quality, but I'll say that the software needs VAST improvement. It sounds very much like this was rushed because of a deadline and I am hoping that this speed issue gets resolved before I go on my July 4th trip because I was hoping to use BE maps for my geocaching.

And yes I have both the latest firmware for my GPS and the latest version of BC.

I am not sure why this was moved...

Your OP was in the Macintosh Software> BaseCamp forum and included the following:

I run Vista on my Gateway laptop. dual 64

Might be a good reason to move it to the Windows Software>BaseCamp forum.

I just purchased BirdsEye tonight and have now transfered about 450 MB of highest quality imagery (144 square miles) to my Oregon 400t without problems. I downloaded the images on and off during the past week before I had even subscribed, so they were all ready to go as soon as my subscription was activated.

I am really not seeing the slowdown issues (yet :)) under Vista 64 on Intel Core2 Duo 2.8ghz with 6GB RAM. But I agree the user interface needs some work. There is no feedback whatsoever that a BirdsEye transfer from the computer to the GPS is in progress, and no notification when it completes. Looking in the \Garmin\BirdsEye directory on the GPS, I could see the files growing however. And if I tried to quit BirdsEye it warned that a transfer was in progress.

I was getting the "invalid BirdsEye File" error message every time I started my GPS before too. I had thrown away the only file in the BirdsEye folder on the Oregon but still got the message. Then I took a look in the BirdsEye folder on my SD card and noticed there was still a Demo.jnx file there. Trashing that file made the error message go away.

I have to say that I'm impressed with the speed of zooming and panning the map at all zoom levels on the GPS. It is much more responsive than the "Custom Maps" that I've made. Also had another nice surprise. After registering my Oregon (which I had evidently never done although I've had it for two years), I got a promo code from Garmin for a 10% discount. I applied this to the BirdsEye purchase and my final price was $26.99.

There is certainly plenty of room for improvement, but this is a nice start! :)

I think the download is slow on purpose. However I think that Garmin is making things worse proceeding this way. Consider this: With this speed I have to download all the areas that I predict can visit in short/medium term. Loading BaseCamp, my computer, and Garmin's servers. On the other hand, if the download was fast I would not need to do so, because I knew that when I decide to visit a certain area I could quickly download the corresponding images.