Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

2019-01-10 Sending it back. After many hours of tinkering, and many hours of writing emails and getting suggestions from Garmin, their final offer was do delete all that I had on the GPS, and do a factory reset. Unfortunately, they didn't know how to actually get it to work. It has some serious bugs, one of which is it gets 'lost' in its self, and turns off when you press Quit. Shown on a youtube vid...you'd have to look for it...I don't think I can post it here. Look for "Garmin GPSMAP 66st - Bugs!" --- I've been using this for a month...the first one failed right away...I plugged it into the USB port of a late model car, and it shut off and never restarted. Garmin replaced it, asking that I ship the old unit to them so that they could try to determine what happened. Lesson learned...I now always carry a "USB condom" to limit USB ports to supplying power, and no data. I imagine that the car's computer tried to access the GPS as a drive, and corrupted something. Garmin said that they'd get back to me if they found out what happened. I've been putting it through its paces, hiking, marking waypoints, creating routes, interfacing with BaseCamp (BC), and so on. I have been using GPSRs since ~1995...several brands...for the past decade or more, I settled on the DeLorme series, and have been using the PN-60 for the most part. My rating of the 66st is based on my use of the PN-60, a 10-year old piece of tech. Garmin recently bought up DeLorme, and promptly killed the DeLorme line, so I figured that it is time that I switched to Garmin. I also use GaiaGPS on my Note 4 to my advantage. My thinking about any piece of tech is that when I buy it, it should be better than, or at least as good as, what I bought 10 years ago. This doesn't mean that the PN-60 or Topo NA are flawless, only that they work better than the 66 and BC. I chose the 66st largely because it is a recent model, and because it has buttons, which I find more useable than a touch screen in the wild and in the winter. The 66 screen is a nice upgrade from the PN-60 in terms of size and pixel density. (65x40mm,400x240 vs 45x35,220x176) The PN-60 screen is crisp, and displays the map in better detail than the 66st. This, despite the better display on the 66. It has to do with the way Garmin has chosen to display the map. I wish the buttons had rounded tops, rather than flat, to make it easier to feel through gloves where each button is. Nonetheless, all the controls feel very crisp. With DeLorme's Topo 9 NA, I was was pretty well set for hiking, cycling, mountain biking, motorcycling, and general auto nav. None of that is very easy with the 66st, not the least because it doesn't come with the detailed maps that I am accustomed to using. I should note that Topo 9 NA was not getting updates, so it was behind the times. And I note that the 66st can use open maps (OSM) if you can get the versions and coverage you want. Once I learned the steps, I was able to download and use a few different map types for my area. The PN-60 easily swaps from street view to topo view...the 66 does, too, IF...a big IF...you have the right maps. I loaded just tonight a map that lets me do this. Big learning curve for this device, and not much help from Garmin. The 66 acquires satellites very quickly, and if you move a long distance with it off, or leave it off for some time, when you turn it on, it is soon ready to go. I have spent /literally/ hours with the device, and with Garmin support, trying to resolve questions that I have. Some are still unresolved. One of the worst, for me, is the state of waypoint icons. Those that come with the 66st are unsuitable for me. Too large. I am accustomed to using custom waypoint symbols. BaseCamp (BC) comes with png images installed, giving the impression that these are OK to use. They are not. It's back to bmp images. Took me some time to figure that out, and then, after I did, tech support (TS) got back to me with the same statement. But that was weeks of experimenting. You'd think that fixed it, eh? But no. All the work on those custom waypoint symbols, which show up in BC as being used in BC and on the 66, is for naught. EVERY SINGLE waypoint shows up using a big blue flag, and TS still doesn't know why. I am pretty facile with Windows, file systems, etc., and the symbols are installed in the correct place. But those hundreds of waypoints that I carried over from DeLorme, where they all showed up with the unique symbols I expect, are all big blue flags in the 66. So in an area where I have many waypoints, all I see is a field of blue. The docs for the 66 and for BC, which are on the web, are dismal. They pretty much tell you the obvious stuff that you can figure out, but not the fine details. I have had questions in to TS for more than a month, and no reply. When I do get a reply, it is generally polite and useful. I even received a note from them that I was not expecting, showing that someone was actually following up on a problem. But many of my questions go unanswered. Managing routes and tracks was so easy in Topo. Not so in BC. You can't simply load or remove routes. You can't toggle them on and off. I am an active cyclist, and have lots of routes that cover an area of 1000 sq km near my home, and those can make a map unreadable if they are all displayed. The web has a lot of people asking the same question I did: How do I unclutter the map? It is doable, but more than I want to write here. The 66st comes with a 100K map, but to get routable maps from Garmin, you need to spend $600 to cover the US, and then it is not clear that they are current or kept current. You can, however, roll your own Open Street Maps (OSM). Another learning curve. The 66 advertises that it can use rechargeable NiMH batteries. This is a big help when I am traveling. I like to charge the batteries as I drive, then use them for the day, and so on. But Garmin cautions us to use only Garmin battery packs, and reviews on the web seem to largely indicate that they perform well at first, but fail early. After monitoring the battery charging voltage, I came to the opinion that it is likely that the 66 overcharges the batteries to begin with, then keeps them at a very high charge level. This can shorten NiMH battery life. The route nav display is not as useful as the PN-60 (turn right, for example, but not why). The selection of alert signals is insufficient. Most are just variations of another one. The map itself looks sort of comic book.I guess this is a result of design choices that Garmin made for their auto GPSRs, but I never liked it. I don't need a comic book. I've been reading real maps for decades, and expect my maps to look business-like. The bottom line is that because I have so much experience with GPSRs, I expected to pick this up and run with it. I have spent too many hours unraveling how to get the GPSMAP 66st and BaseCamp working. Every time I go to the web to get some solution, I see that there are many others with exactly the same questions. For a product line that is this old, this is sloppy and unacceptable.