Getting older. Got a hitch in my gitalong. I have an opportunity to go out on a new ranch, about 20 miles from Crystal City, TX, and hunt pigs, hike, tell stories (all true?), drink some and have a good time.. It's closer to the Mexican border than the other ranch I go to. I just want to be able to have the SOS capability. I have the PN-40, PN-60, Topo10 and all my old maps working. I have an old SPOT and three models of InReach of which I don't know if they work or can be put back into service for SOS purposes. Cell phone service can be marginal in some of these areas.
I had been using Street Atlas & Topo USA for YEARS! Anybody know of the best application replacements that run on Windows PC's, have downloadable, offline maps, can create waypoint and track files, has available imagery files, for an affordable price? I know about 500 users that would buy it.
Incorrect date on PN-60 (and PN-40) as of 10-25-18.
The date on PN-60 now reads March 12, 1999. It also date stamps a track file with that date. The older PN-40 is also the same wrong date. I guess an internal calendar has expired and reset? I see no way to the change date displayed and would have thought it comes from the satelite.
Anyone else have this happening? Any fix? Would a reset do anything?
For now I will just have to manually rename track files.
Haven't dusted off the PN-60 in quite a while. So I can't say I've seen the symptom. But it's not unreasonable...
The date does come from the GPS navigation signal. However, the signal does not carry an absolute date. I don't remember the gory details, but it's some kind of relative week/time of week thing. It does periodically wrap around. I would guess that that's what happened here - and the PN-xx firmware did not compensate. I suspect you're stuck with it.
Note that the time stamps on individual track points inside the track files are also going to be incorrect. This might or might not matter to you, depending on what you do with the track files.
Thanks for the response. Nice to hear from a voice from the (GPS) past.
As you noted, I expect I am struck with the wrong date. The time is correct though and that I really don't care about much. I will now be renaming the track file either within the PN-60 or when downloaded into Topo. The track files I make from hikes or paddles become part of a "digital" diary with additional info added to file name. I have (had) years of projects in Topo. When I migrated to Windows 10 I managed to get Topo installed BUT the file structure of the projects seem to have the old path locked in from Win XP.... so now Topo can't find tracks in Win 10 A winter job is to rename hundreds of track files to have them sort by year-place-date.
My reason to keep using the PN-60 is for the (reasonably close) accuracy of the track distance while hiking or paddling. I bought a well known other brand of GPS but the distance reported was always way too high. I understand why that was but the old PN-60 just had better algorithms to correct or ignore the random "pings".
I continue to search for a way to get more accuracy out of current available handheld GPS's.
I performed an error analysis of track distance results. Consider that the track is a straight line due north. All errors can be resolved into a NS component and an EW component. The NS components will cancel out. However, the EW will accumulate.
