I have a few questions regarding the use of the fenix 5x with POIs in basecamp and with maps and hope someone can help.
Some Background:
I bought my fenix in August and synced over all my POIs from my handheld GPS to Basecamp and from there onto the 5x.
Having read and seen how people install various maps on the 5x, I installed some maps from frikart.no and some old Garmin topo maps (I’d say at least 10 years old, not sure). I seem to remember dragging the mapfiles straight onto the mounted Garmin USB drive, info the top Garmin folder. No problem, watch worked beautifully and I had both my numerous POIs and maps with iso-lines on the watch. After two months i was playing around in the watch settings and switched off some of the installed maps within the watch - from that moment the watch started behaving eratically, crashing and restarting, but it was still briefly useable. I’m not sure if i still managed to connect the watch to my mac once more, but eventually it went into a crash and restart loop. It would start, get to the point where it loads maps, load maps for some time, crash, and restart again.
I tried all the reset options I found on the net: wiping user settings, forcing the watch into usb mode, using Garmin webupdater to reflash firmware, but nothing worked. I could no longer mount the watch in usb mode. I could access the reset user settings menu, but a reset had no effect.
Contacted Garmin, got an RMA number, and they very quicky sent out a replacement watch to me.
Since the problem occured whilst in the watch settings, I thought this was a one off problem and reinstalled the old Garmin maps in the new watch, this time using mapinstall (thinking that this was the recommended way to do it). This time the watch went straight into the crash and reboot loop, again none of the resets worked, neither on mac or PC. I tried with two different usb cables, no luck. I looked at the output of the terminal when the watch wa restarting and whilst it briefly identified a Garmin usb device, this disappeared before a usb disk could be mounted.
Again I contacted the helpful folks at Garmin. Again they sent me a replacement watch. However, this time they informed me the problem was my use of Basecamp and mapinstall with the watch. According to the Service engineer, the only software that is suitable for use with the 5X is Garmin express, and the only topo maps suitable for use with the 5X are Garmin maps available for purchase through Garmin express.
After this rather lengthy prelude, my questions are now:
A) can I really not use Basecamp with the 5X - this seems silly since that is the best way to manage my POIs, which are all in Basecamp. How else can I get those across (in excess of 300 POIs) - is there a way to do this through Garmin Express? Basecamp “seems” to work just fine with the watch and identifies it correctly.
B) Do I really have to pay another 120 ++ USD equivalent to get maps? The included maps do not have iso-lines, and are therefore pretty much useless to me. Topomaps with isolines are freely available for Garmin devices on e.g frikart.no and since we here in Norway at least have paid for the hard part of mapping through taxes, and the maps are made freely available by the government, it seems a rather unnecessary additional expense. Is there any way to use these maps safely without causing the crash and reboot loop (assuming it is in fact the maps that corrupt the software).
Without being able to synch POIs and topomaps the watch is not much use to me, but at the same time I have been warned that the watch won’t be replaced another time should the same problem occur. Any advice, anyone form Garmin who can chime in on this?
Best regards,
Peter
