Dale
Registered user
I thought I might post this in the hope that there are a few Garmin software engineers are lurking on this forum, or perhaps Pan (Michael) will forward it on to the right folk. 
I have had the 2820 for 2 weeks to play with, have done around R2500km with it and am generally very happy thus far. The large touch screen and MP3 player are both a winner on the bike (no more falling asleep on long trips
) and now that the phone and the GPS are talking to each other I can see who’s calling without pulling over each time. All in all a very nice piece of kit! 
Why is it so poor at handling tracks? I previously had a 76CSx and when I look at the way it handled tracks I can’t understand why Garmin have not incorporated the same technology in the 2820. I realise that they are designed to different market segments, but if Garmin is serious about this being used as a bike unit, then surely it makes sense to have the track facility available?
Loading tracks from the GPS to the PC is fine but most of the most basic functions wrt tracks seem to be missing, ie …
You cannot set the frequency with which track points are recorded, meaning you have no control over how many kilometres your 10000 track points will last. I reckon about 2300km for a mix of road and off road riding – not really sufficient for those week-long tours.
You cannot load a track from the PC to the GPS, - this is a big issue for anyone wanting to use it off road,
It is very difficult to see the track on the screen (is just a small dotted line),
And lastly, one of the greatest features of the “x-range” of GPs’s is the ability to store tracks on the memory not used by maps / waypoints etc. I would have thought that the 2820 with it’s huge 2gb memory would be a prime candidate for this system. We already have the ability to access the memory card directly, wouldn’t it be great if the tracks were written there (eliminating the 10000 point limitation)?
I am aware of the concerns regarding the use of a “trackback” feature on a vehicle based GPS, but I would have thought that Garmin would at least give us the ability to manage tracks & logs a bit better. IIRC, the 60 series, 76 series and the 276’s all have both auto-routing and trackback. Can anyone confirm this? How do these systems “react” when you try to trackback along a one way street?
I’d be keen to hear the thoughts of others.
Dale
I have had the 2820 for 2 weeks to play with, have done around R2500km with it and am generally very happy thus far. The large touch screen and MP3 player are both a winner on the bike (no more falling asleep on long trips
) and now that the phone and the GPS are talking to each other I can see who’s calling without pulling over each time. All in all a very nice piece of kit! Why is it so poor at handling tracks? I previously had a 76CSx and when I look at the way it handled tracks I can’t understand why Garmin have not incorporated the same technology in the 2820. I realise that they are designed to different market segments, but if Garmin is serious about this being used as a bike unit, then surely it makes sense to have the track facility available?
Loading tracks from the GPS to the PC is fine but most of the most basic functions wrt tracks seem to be missing, ie …
You cannot set the frequency with which track points are recorded, meaning you have no control over how many kilometres your 10000 track points will last. I reckon about 2300km for a mix of road and off road riding – not really sufficient for those week-long tours.
You cannot load a track from the PC to the GPS, - this is a big issue for anyone wanting to use it off road,
It is very difficult to see the track on the screen (is just a small dotted line),
And lastly, one of the greatest features of the “x-range” of GPs’s is the ability to store tracks on the memory not used by maps / waypoints etc. I would have thought that the 2820 with it’s huge 2gb memory would be a prime candidate for this system. We already have the ability to access the memory card directly, wouldn’t it be great if the tracks were written there (eliminating the 10000 point limitation)?
I am aware of the concerns regarding the use of a “trackback” feature on a vehicle based GPS, but I would have thought that Garmin would at least give us the ability to manage tracks & logs a bit better. IIRC, the 60 series, 76 series and the 276’s all have both auto-routing and trackback. Can anyone confirm this? How do these systems “react” when you try to trackback along a one way street?
I’d be keen to hear the thoughts of others.
Dale
