Hello everybody,
I purchased my first Garmin GPS device yesterday, and it is a bit of a letdown.
I am new to the GPS world (almost) and I wanted a GPS to guide me on long distance bicycle tours, that could double as a decent in-car GPS too. I am in Belgium, and around here we are blessed with good cycle path maps, so I decided to take the plunge.
After much searching, I determined that the Garmin GPSMap 60Cx would be the ideal device for me. So I went to my local Garmin dealer and bought a combo pack containing the 60Cx, a bicycle mount and a "Routeplanner and GPS navigation in Belgium and Luxemburg" CD, containing maps specifically designed for cyclists in those countries. On top of that, I purchased the City Navigator NT Europe CD to get detailed maps at street level, to get directions in my car. Overall, I'm out 530 euros.
So, I figured I'd take care of the car functionality first. I installed the City Navigator CD first, it installed Mapsource, no problem so far. Then I tried to unlock the map. It took me a good hour and much Googling to figure that one out. But I already knew about Garmin's terrible map key system, so fair enough.
But; in the course of unlocking my maps, the unlock wizard software asked me if I wanted to get my unit ID directly from the device. Great, one less number to track down I thought, so I clicked that, plugged the device to a USB port, and pronto, Mapsource crashed. Uh oh, that's not good...
Then I tried to install the map into the device. Crash again :( I then upgraded Mapsource and tried again. This time, it displays a popup saying there's an error communicating with the device, but if I click OK, it works. Better than nothing.
Then, the horror: it took over 2 hours to generate the files for the entire map of Europe on my local drive, and over 2 again to upload them. 4 1/2....FRIGGIN....HOURS!!! But no matter, I figured I'd do it only once, so I waited.
Then, finally at long last, the device was ready. I tried it a bit and was very satisfied. Especially, I was concerned that the "find address" function would work, and indeed it does. It seems to calculate routes reasonably fast, and seems to pick up honest ways to get to a location.
So I figured I'd add the cycle map. Since I already had Mapsource installed, I tried to add the map that's on the CD. No luck, so I ended up installing the CD, which reinstalled Mapsource, which I had to update yet again to work around the crashy USB connection issue. Then, 20 minutes to unlock that map (I'm used to look for keys all over the place now, and I'm getting good at finding the ones the software expects). In Mapsource, I selected the new map, and hit "transfer to device", figuring it'd add them to the ones I had already loaded. That map is small, it "only" took 1 1/2 hour. Nearly there I thought...
Foolish me: it zapped the City Navigator map and REPLACED them!! NOOO!!! So I fired up Mapsource again, added both City Navigator and Belux cycling maps, hit "transfer to device" and went to bed (it took 5 hours this time :().
This morning, I finally get to try my 60Cx with routable city and cycle path maps: it seems to work, but the find function doesn't anymore: most countries are missing in the region field, it doesn't know big cities around my area, and when it finds streets, it doesn't find the street number anymore. I figured it tried to use the cycle path maps to find things, instead of using both maps. I tried to find a way to disable the cycle path maps, but no luck.
So, I'm uploaded the City Navigator maps alone once more (should be done by midday), and I'll buy another SD card just for cycling, in which I'll install the Belux parts of the City Navigator CD and the cycling paths maps: I'll use the first SD card for car navigation, and the second for cycling only.
What a crappy way of doing it, but at least I can do what I originally wanted I suppose.
Oh and I forget: I tried to update my City Navigator maps (which, the dealer told me, "are lifetime updatable, that's why it's 99 euros") and it required me to install the Garmin Communicator Plugin. Guess what: the plugin crashes Firefox 3.5 as soon as it hits the test page, or the Dashboard thing in my account. No updates for me I guess...
The end result of my poor user experience story is that I think I should have bought a cheap car GPS (one that doesn't require me to enter a million map keys to unlock the maps) and stuck to my paper maps and a cheap latitude/longitude GPS for my bike. Unless the device proves really good when I travel with it, which I haven't tried yet, so far it feels like 530 euros down the drain... :(
