GPS

My dissappointment with the Garmin60csx was: - it doesn't seem to support raster maps, just vector maps. So you can't get your topo50 maps, satellite photos, etc in there. - the standard software does not let you upload custom vector maps either. Maybe you can buy an option, but never found a free way of doing this. - You CAN upload tracks and points - BUT there's a bug in the track system. The 'save' function for tracks loses the 'start new segment' flag, so if you have a track (or something else you are uploading as a track because you've no other way of getting it into the system) which has more than one segment in it, they all get joined together! And not necessarily in the order you expect either: the Picton-St Arnaud segment of Ta Araroa might get joined to the Southland segment and then back to Nelson Lakes ... and you end up with a spider web of straight lines connecting your real data! In other words, found it great if all you wanted to do was use the standard maps. But useless if you wanted to display custom information. Maybe someone out there's found a way round this ... answers welcome!

The ability to load raster maps in the 62 is a great new feature. I am certain there is no way to do this with the 60. With tracks on the 60, I never save tracks in the field. I just allow the tracks to save on the microSD card. The last 10,000 points are in GPS memory, which is plenty. If I am loading tracks back into the GPS I massage the track in Mapsource or Gartrip. I join all the tracks I want into 1 segment and then use the filter feature to compress the track to 1 point every 30m. This brings most tracks down to less than 500 points. You have to watch you don't load tracks greater then 500 points because it will truncate the track rather than compress it. ie. Any points >500 won't be there! Rename the track to something meaningful and it will load into one of the saved track memories. Saving tracks in the field is a waste of time because it removes all your time data and then compresses your track (up to 10,000 points) into 500 points so you loose a lot of data. The tracks on the SD card cannot be read from the GPS but can be removed from the unit by reading the card on the computer. You have 1 GPX file for each day. The 62 I think handles tracks a little differently, not quite sure how at the moment. BTW.. The local shop is selling the 62 for $599 which is the recommended retail. Amazing considering the US price is US$450. KiwiGPS is doing them for $575.

BTW.. The 62s is the one we should be looking at in NZ. The difference is that the 62st has the North American topos preloaded.

My mistake. That would explain the much lower built-in memory in the 62st.

The main thing we needed to load into the 60csx were property boundaries and designated waterways. Take the waterways: streams have multiple forks, and so a GPS which joins the ends of all the forks together with straight lines wasn't much use. What you say about the save makes sense. Either waterways or property boundaries displayed fine when uploaded into the 'current' track on the GPS. But as soon as you saved them they were mangled and interconnected as I described. The problem being that we needed to use the 'track' facility of the GPS for just that: recording our route. So couldn't use it to display the waterways too. Sound like the 62 is the way to go. Especially at that price - $100 less than we paid for the 60csx. Is the reception as good on the 62 as on the 60csx? Still work in deep gullies and wet bush canopy?

I would expect the antenna to be the same if not better. I havn't seen any bad reports in the forums. There is an issue that some guys complain about, when you squeeze the case it squeeks, sounds shoddy. Worries some people but not others. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRj_y8wxES0 Madpom, Sounds like you would be better to get your tracks and then load them back into the GPS as a map. You should be able to do this with GPSMapedit and cGPSMapper, both free utilities. Map making is a bit of a black art but should be quite easy if you are loading just a few segmenys of track.

Has anyone played with the Memory Map Adventurer 2800?

The question would be, can you get NZ maps for the Memory Map Adventurer?

Apparently it comes with both Topo250 and Topo50 maps loaded for the NZ model. http://memory-map.com.au/products/adventurer-gps.html

Looks quite cool. It doesn't say but those are probably Raster maps. It's be interesting to see the thing in action. It is about $100 more expensive than the Garmin 62s, but then it does also include the maps.