February 16, 2003
Broken Garmin GPS
I have disliked Garmin from almost the first day I used my Etrex Vista and Mapsource software. We've spent a lot of time documenting how shabby Mapsource is. Over Christmas I found that the hardware was junk too!
31die and I wanted to set up a Singapore geocache. We were stymied, though when the 'clikstick' control started working increasingly intermittently and I was having bad visual effects on the screen -- black lines, missing lines, etc. The unit was unusable.
Quick searches on Google revealed other people with the same problems, which could only be solved by sending the unit in -- no software patch would fix it. Ironically, at the same time, my colleague, MonoRaj, had been dissuaded by a salesman in NYC from buying the Etrex Vista, as they found it unreliable.
Of course my unit was a month out of warranty.
Anyhow, 31die took it back to the US to save me the international postage and sorted out the RMA. Garmin "graciously" covered the problem for free. (I would have raised a hew and cry if they had tried to charge me the $125 service fee -- this is a well documented, apparently systemic problem in these $300+ units)
Promised at best a two-week turnaround, 31 sent it in. Surprisingly, it was returned and repaired less than a week later.
The service report read:
- "Confirmed Problem. Resoldered click stick switch and display flex cable to correct problem. ... Unit passes all tests and is operating within normal limits."
Bad soldering? That is lame. But at least it's fixed and apparently tuned.
What drives me nuts is that Garmin acts like Microsoft in that they seem to emphasize "new features and new products" instead of worrying first about reliability. Shit, I'm trying to figure out why I'm having video problems with my unit, so I download the latest patch. It's not to fix the video problem, it's to add functionality so I can make High Altitude Low Opening parachute jumps like some wannabe Navy Seal! Hell's Bells... who would even want to use the unit in circumstances like that when this unit seems to regularly fail and act flaky.
It would be interesting to see what commercial-quality alternatives there are to Garmin.
The first candidate must be Trimble, used by surveyors, but their functionality might be inappropriate to our usage (adventure trips). We're not as concerned about absolute accuracy, but instead good map uploading/downloading, route planning, size, and robustness. Expensive? Probably, although this sounds like a candidate for an Ebay purchase.
The horrifying thing was that in some of the photos of commandos at Mazar-e Sharif I distinctly saw those guys using Garmin Etrex units! That's suggesting Garmin is the best option? Good grief...
What's with the black lines ???